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From Ndubuisi Orji, Abuja
House of Representatives has queried alleged extra-budgetary expenditures by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation ( NNPC) on the Turn Around Maintenance (TAM) on the country’s four refineries.
Consequently, the House Ad-hoc Committee probing the state of the country’s refineries, on Friday, directed the NNPC to furnish it with the Federal Executive Council ( FEC) approvals for $
$1.3 billion spent on the refineries, $5.321 million expenditures incurred on the July 26, 2017 for comprehensive technical plants as well as another $55 million paid on the same day.
A member of the committee, Ibrahim Isiaka, who stood in for the chairman, Ganiyu Johnson, said the panel will embark on a physical inspection of the refineries especially the Port Harcourt facility, to ascertain the level of investment already made in them.
Isiaka said “We need to put so many things in their right perspectives and allow Nigerians to know the challenges we are having and we put heads together to know how we are going to solve them. It’s so unfortunate that we have left what we are supposed to do undone and we have come to this level.
“But nothing is spoiled yet. We are on what we called damage control. The committee is a kind of fact finding so that we can have legislative input on how to assist the NNPC and the refineries managers on how we can come back on stream.
The lawmaker added “there have been so many petitions to National assembly about how much has been spent in the last 10 years about rehabilitation, turnaround maintenance, overhauling, all sorts of names of our refineries and yet we can’t get them works.
“Then, again, you can see the revelations. Even Warri and Kaduna refineries, as you can see, if you pump money to put the refineries back in place, how do we get crude because the pipeline networks are already in bad shape.
“And Port Harcourt refinery, the old and new they are trying to fix, we equally advised them, if you have old and new and you are to move at certain stage to get your engineering procurement, installation for the new one, at least one aspect, get it running. Let’s see. All Nigerians are eager to see that petroleum produced here.
“We are going to the field. It is just going to be a class room academic exercise. We are going to verify. We are going there to have physical checks. We just want to establish our facts, arm ourselves with what we are able to extract from their documents and then, when we go there, you are asking specific questions to get specific answers.”
