A subsidiary of the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), National Petroleum Investment Management Services (NAPIMS), submitted that the agency spent a whopping $9million on staff transfers in its 2016 budgetary allocation, and $2million for maintenance of vehicles, out of its $171million budgetary allocation.
The submission visibly angered the Senate committee, on Petroleum (Upstream) led by its Chairman, Senator Tayo Alasoadura (APC Ondo Central), who immediately demanded a breakdown of the total budget profile.
But the General Manager of the petroleum agency, Engineer Catherine Ngozi Iheme, who made the submissions, responded when she told committee members that the yearly budget of the agency is always broken into capital and operating expenditure, as already stated in the 2016 budget performance document of the agency forwarded to the committee.
According to her, out of the $171million 2016 total budget of the agency, $17.7m was for capital expenditure and $154million for operating expenditure where the cost of staff transfers and vehicles maintenance were domiciled.
When taken up by the committee members to explain what she meant by staff transfers, she said, “we are part of the NNPC Group and sometimes you have staff transferred in and out of one subsidiary to the other with attendant payment of required allowances.”
The committee members, who further took her up on the $2million allegedly spent on vehicles maintenance, ordered her to make available to them, details of the agency’s spending of the entire $171million 2016 budget latest by tomorrow, as against the lump sum presented.
“This submission on your spending of the 2016 budgetary provisions to us is outrageous and we are not comfortable at all. Had it been I have the power, I would have taken all of you to the bar beach and do the needful,” declared the committee chairman.
The committee and the petroleum agency, also had heated argument over the exact exchange rate used by the agency in the implementation of the budget, in view of the N197 to a dollar exchange rate used upon which the budget was based and N305 used for its implementation.