The Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI), a federal government agency with a mandate to ensure transparency and accountability as well as expose corruption in the oil and gas industry, but with no power to prosecute, has gone to the country’s anti-corruption body to “borrow teeth” and “bite” those who plunder Nigeria’s mineral resources.
The Director of Communications of NEITI, Dr Orji Ogbonnaya Orji, told jourbalists in Lagos last week that his toothless agency is seeking a partnership with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, to “bite companies found wanting in accountability and transparency issues”.
Since oil was first discovered in Nigeria 60 years ago in 1956 and began selling two years after in 1958, billions of dollars have ended in private bank accounts while black gold has been described by many as a curse, instead of a blessing it should be, leaving many wondering what has befallen Africa’s most populous country.
Contracts signed with international oil companies were terribly flawed and skewed against Nigeria’s best interest.
Ordinary Nigerians have remained stuck in squalor and hopelessness while a privileged few have continued to crisscross the planet in private jets and have acquired oil blocks through an opaque and corrupt system.
Several reports over the years have been dumped in the corridors of power and virtually no one has been prosecuted for gargantuan plundering of Nigeria’s cash cow.
In its 2013 audit report, NEITI alleged that over $13.29 billion of oil money were withheld over a period of nine years by the country’s oil company, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC.
NEITI accused the NNPC and its subsidiaries of failing to remit $3.8 billion and N358.3 billion in 2013 alone, and over $12 billion between 2005 and 2009.
Several other reports from KPMG to PwC as well as a detailed letter from the country’s former apex bank chief, Lamido Sanusi, exposed massive looting of Nigeria’s oil money with little steps taken by those in power.
But Mr. Ogbonnaya, the NEITI spokesman, told 25 Journalists last Tuesday during an oil and gas training sponsored by the Natural Resource Governance Institute, NRGI, that things were about to change.
His agency has approached the EFCC, he said, “to ensure that anyone found guilty of misappropriating the country’s oil revenue is prosecuted”.
“NEITI is partnering with the EFCC to study the audit reports of companies to identify areas where financial crimes have been committed against the nation.
“The extractive industry remains the backbone of the Nigerian economy, which necessitates NEITI’s efforts toward ensuring accountability and transparency in the sector,” he added.