The Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA) has reconciled government’s expenditure on fuel subsidy between 2006 and 2011 with the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI).
The reconciliation is meant to address discrepancies encountered during the Farouk Lawan-led House of Representatives Adhoc Committee on Monitoring of Subsidy Regime.
During the House’ probe, different organisations including the Ministry of Finance and the NEITI gave different figures as the cost of subsidy.
NEITI had told the probe panel that only N370 billion was spent as subsidy in 2008 as against N630.571 billion. The PPPRA had sent a letter detailing the exact amounts spent on subsidy between 2006 and 2011 to NEITI and the House of Representatives.
The letter signed by the PPPRA Executive Secretary, Reginald Stanley partly read: “The Executive Secretary may wish to recall her submission to the House of Representatives Ad Hoc Committee on Monitoring of Subsidy Regime on subsidy claims for 2006-2011. It is observed that your submission in respect of subsidy figures for 2008 didn’t capture payments made to other marketers during the period under consideration.
“The sum of N370 billion subsidy figure for 2008 quoted by NEITI represents payments to NNPC only. Therefore, the imbalance noticed in the figures submitted by NEITI and that of PPPRA was due to non-inclusion of subsidy payments to other marketers in your computation.”
A breakdown of the figures sent to NEITI by the PPPRA as subsidy expenditures were as follows: N261.105 billion was spent in 2006 from which NNPC got N241.893 billion and other marketers N19.212 billion; in 2007, a total of N278.859 billion was spent from which NNPC got N227.471 billion and other marketers N51.388 billion.In 2008, N630.571 billion was spent with NNPC getting N370.49 billion and other marketers N260.081 billion while in 2009, out of N463.517 billion spent, NNPC got N261.51 billion and other marketers got N202 billion.
In 2010, the government spent N673 billion and NNPC received N389 billion and other marketers got N283.979 billion. PPPRA said as at August, last year, NNPC received N667.534 billion while other marketers received N680.982 billion as at October, making a total of N1.35 trillion.
However, more payments have been made by the government shooting up 2011 subsidy to N1.7 trillion, while more payments are still being expected.
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PPPRA, NEITI reconcile fuel subsidy expenditure