The Senate Committee on Public Accounts has resolved to summon the heads of some organisations and players in the oil sector over discrepancies in records of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) imports into Nigeria between 2021 and 2023. The organisations are the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA), the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) and the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI).
The committee’s chairperson, Ibrahim Dankwambo, announced the resolution on Tuesday after the NMDPRA appeared before the panel to respond to queries raised in NEITI’s Oil and Gas Industry Audit Report covering the period. Mr Dankwambo, who represents Gombe North Senatorial District, said the heads of the three agencies would be required to explain the discrepancies and work towards reconciling the conflicting figures.
The senator, a former Accountant-General of the Federation, expressed dissatisfaction with the significant differences between the PMS import figures presented by the NMDPRA and those recorded by NNPCL for 2022 and 2023. Rabiu Umar, the chief executive of the NMDPRA, was represented at the hearing by Uzoamaka Ugwu-Ojobe, a director in the agency. Ms Ugwu-Ojobe told the lawmakers that the authority recorded 3.29 billion litres of PMS imports in 2022 and 6.02 billion litres in 2023.
These figures differed significantly from NNPCL’s records of 6.27 billion litres and 3.88 billion litres for the respective years. She maintained that the NMDPRA’s figures were credible despite the discrepancies. “We stand by 3.29 billion litres of PMS as volume imported in 2022 and 6.02 billion litres as volume imported in 2023 against 6.27 billion litres recorded by NNPCL in 2022 and 3.88 billion litres in 2023,” she said.
However, her explanation failed to convince members of the committee, who questioned how two government agencies responsible for different aspects of the petroleum sector could maintain such divergent records