TheCable

Senate President Bukola Saraki has promised the leadership of the Nigeria Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (NEITI) that the upper legislative chamber would debate the 2013 audit report in view of the revelations of mismanagement contained in it.

According to a statement by Sanni Onogu, Saraki’s chief press secretary, the senate president disclosed this when Waziri Adio, executive secretary of NEITI, led the management of the organisation to present a copy of the 2013 audit report to him.

Onogu said Saraki lauded the NEITI boss for formally presenting the report to the senate, and also gave him the assurance that the report would not die.

“I agree with you entirely that this type of opportunity also enables us to strengthen the institutions such as yours that have the responsibility of improving the governance and transparency administration of the management of our resources,” he was quoted as saying.

“In preparation for this courtesy call, I studied the report in the early hours of this morning, and honestly I was just dumbfounded about the figures that we are talking about.

“To me and on our own part in this senate, what I am going to assure you is that apart from getting the report, I have already told my office ‘let’s get the report, we circulate it to all members of the senate’ and I promise you we are going to have a plenary session on it. And the day we are going to have it, it is going to be live on television. Let us discuss it. It is serious!

“I mean look at the figures they are talking about?  And like you rightly said, you will just publish it and it will go and nobody will say anything about it? What is the ICPC doing? What is the EFCC doing? This is what is killing this country.

“But I can assure you that under this 8th senate this kind of reports are not going to die without anybody doing something about it. We will shout until something is done because there must be responsibility of those who are professionals that should advise political leaders of these positions.”

The senate president added that there was a need to talk about laws to strengthen agencies like NEITI because of the type of responsibility they were saddled with.

He further urged the agency to fast-track the preparation of the 2014 and 2015 reports so as to make them public in good time.

Earlier, Adio said that the team was at the national assembly to officially present a copy of the report of the agency to the senate president.

“We believe that this is very important for us to get traction on the responsibilities that the good people of the federal republic of Nigeria through your grace have endowed us with,” he said.

Adio also lamented the level of mismanagement of resources in the oil and gas industry over the years and said that the country has no definite account of the oil produced over the period.

He said the NEITI 2013 industry audit reports showed that revenues in the oil and gas industry were not fully remitted to the federation account, adding that the danger posed on the economy due to the misappropriation of these funds were enormous.