THE Senate Committee on Navy, on Monday, frowned on the starving of funds to the Nigerian Navy to fight the increasing rate of oil theft in the country.
The committee chairman, Senator Chris Anyanwu, said 11 months into the end of 2013, only 55.8 per cent capital budget of the Navy had been released. Yet, they blame the Navy for not fighting oil theft enough.
The committee, which was on oversight function, expressed sadness that the Navy did not have enough resources to fuel its vessels.
According to the chairman, “We need mechanism to get this done because, it cannot be done out of a regular budget envelope. When they give you the statistics of how much they need to fuel one of their vessels, you would be alarmed.”
Senator Anyanwu noted that there was no provision for that in the overhead, and if they used all their overheads, they could not fire all their vessels. “So, as an oil producing country that has NNPC, there should be a special arrangement with NNPC to give the Navy people bunker fuel to run their vessels.”
Anyanwu added that it was a matter of putting heads together to find a creative solution for that, and by that, whatever money in their overhead would not be consumed by items such as fuel.
Also, the committee noted that there was the problem of spare parts for the vessels and the helicopters, which were all put in the capital budget and yet the capital was not being released.
“So where do they get the spare parts to put in the helicopters.
“Do we have to wait for the day the helicopter would drop out of the sky for us to realise that this is not the right way to do it. Perhaps we should think about retrieving items like spare parts from capital and putting them into recurrent or in the overhead.”
The senate committee chairman of Navy said if there was no money in the country, the government should say so and they could all go home.
She regretted that the capital releases so far, which amounted to only 55.8 per cent, was not even enough to deal with one of the major capital items, such as funding of the Offshore Patrol Vessels (OPV) being constructed in China.
Anyanwu admonished the ministry of finance to ensure that the country’s obligation to their clients (the Chinese) with regards to the OPV are met because if it faults in the payment schedule, then it leads to failure in terms of the projects.
Also, “we are not happy that major areas like the development of the jetties and the purchase of a helicopter which was, in fact, put in the budget as a replacement to the one that crashed has left a vacuum in the operative last year.”
The need for the replacement of the helicopters, she explained, was based on the need that the Navy was spending a lot of its resources in fuelling the ship.

http://www.tribune.com.ng/news2013/index.php/en/news/item/25562-fg-not-ready-to-fight-oil-theft-senate.html