Governor of Central Bank, Mallam Lamido Sanusi, has decried the
controversy over the oil price benchmark for the 2013 budget.
Sanusi, who spoke to our correspondent in Jos, Plateau State,
after delivering the second annual lecture on the 87th birthday of
former Head of State, Gen Yakubu Gowon, at the National
Institute for Policy and Strateic Studies, Kuru, near Jos, said
having more money to spend was not the solution to the
country’s woes, but how to improve the quality of capital
expenditure.
While government had pegged the oil price for the 2013 budget
at $75 per barrel, members of the National Assembly wanted the
government to jerk it up to $80 per barrel
The CBN governor said the pegging of the oil price at $75 per
barrel was to make the budget more realistic, especially with the
fluctuations experienced by the Nigerian National Petroleum
Corporation.
He said, “The revenue assumptions of the budget involve two
variables and they are fundemental issues. It assumes price and
assumes quantity. This budget already assumes 2.53 million
barrels a day for 365 days in 2013. In my view, given the
historical performance of NNPC, that output projections are
already over optmistic. NNPC will never achieve that target.
Historically, it had failed to bring up enough money for 2.3
million barrels per day or 2.2 mbd.
“The underestimation does not just come from price, it comes
from output. Now output is actually when you have more control.
If you are going to have a budget that says NNPC is going to
produce 2.35 mbd, do we have any process to determine that
NNPC actually produces that quantity daily? Do we know how
much NNPC produces? And do we know that everything that is
produced in this country translates into revenue that gets back to
government and which government hardly gets?
Sanusi said the reason why government did not get all the
derivable revenue was because of the leakages in the production
process, through illegal piping of petroleum products and illegal
refining
He said, “We know for a fact that there are illegal refineries,
illegal pipelines; we know where these refinries are, we know who
own them. I mean, does anybody ever believe that security
services in Nigeria do not know where the illegal refineries are
located in the Niger Delta or who own them? Those are the
leakages.
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