Audit the NNPC now

No doubt, this has also contributed to the controversy surrounding how much oil and gas has been sold over the years; how much was due, and was subsequently remitted (or not) to the Federation Account, including the recent allegations that over US20 billion dollars, or about 3 trillion naira is missing, to which the authorities […]

No doubt, this has also contributed to the controversy surrounding how much oil and gas has been sold over the years; how much was due, and was subsequently remitted (or not) to the Federation Account, including the recent allegations that over US20 billion dollars, or about 3 trillion naira is missing, to which the authorities have made to definite response.
Indeed facts have emerged indicating that, for quite some time now, the government has been using the NNPC to fund projects and programmes without bothering to subject them to the scrutiny of the National Assembly, a potentially serious constitutional breach. Questions have even arisen too regarding the actual amount of crude petroleum and gas being lifted from Nigeria by the multinational oil firms, and the serious shortfalls arising there from. The very opaque and murky manner the entire issue of petrol and kerosene subsidy is being managed is also another area of concern that needs to be addressed.
But much more alarming is the shirking of responsibility for auditing the NNPC. Appearing before the House of Representatives’ Committee on Public Accounts to defend the 2013 and 2014 budgets, the Auditor General of the Federation, Samuel Ukura, insisted that “the burgeoning of NNPC’s operations since the oil boom of the 1970s and failure of the existing Audit Act to capture the various reforms in the oil sector” had hampered the capacity of his office to periodically check and vet the audit report of the Corporation, adding however that his office had “started the audit of the NNPC’s finances to ascertain the whereabouts of trillions of naira of oil revenues said to have either been misappropriated or unremitted, or “missing”, to the Federation Account over the years. The Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Mrs Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said that this audit had already started. The chairman of Senate Committee of Finance, Ahmed Makarfi, later asked Mrs Okonjo-Iweala to stand down her appointed panel of auditors, adding to the bewildering confusion over what is going on.  
However, just few days later, the Legal Unit of the Office of the Auditor-General of the Federation stated that Section 85(3) of the constitution does not empower the office to “audit the accounts of or appoint auditors for government statutory corporations, commissions, authorities, agencies, including all persons and bodies established by the Act of the National Assembly”.
Whereas Section 85 (2) of the 1999 Constitution empowers the Auditor-General of the Federation or anyone authorised by him to audit “the public accounts of the Federation and of all offices and courts of the Federation” and submit his report to the National Assembly, Subsection 3 of Section 85 however states that “Nothing in subsection (2) of this section shall be construed as authorising the Auditor-General to audit the accounts of or appoint auditors for government statutory corporations, commissions, authorities, agencies, including all persons and bodies established by an Act of the National Assembly” thus limiting his powers in respect of the matter. Instead, the Auditor-General “shall” provide NNPC and similar bodies with a list of qualified external auditors to choose from, guide them on fees to pay the external auditors, and comment on their accounts and the external auditor’s reports.
Only after the new Audit Act, currently before the National Assembly, is passed into law, would the Auditor-General be repositioned to carry out the audit of these institutions, his legal officers point out, noting that consequently, the Auditor-General “does not audit the accounts of NNPC for now.”
While the National Assembly should expedite action on the new Audit Act, the failure to audit NNPC even under the provisions of the existing Act, is sufficiently reprehensible and demand the immediate, thorough and transparent forensic audit of the Corporation without further delay.