PIB: Minister To Spend N6bn On Lobby

Rivers State Governor, Rotimi Amaechi (right) and his Oyo State counterpart, Governor Abiola Ajimobi, during Amaechi’s visit to Ibadan on Wednesday.

The Ministry of Petroleum Resources, has disclosed its plan to expend about N6 billion on awareness campaign meant to sell the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) to stakeholders including the lawmakers with a view to ensuring its passage this time in the National Assembly.

The ministry is also proposing another N1billion to carry out full scale assessment of oil spillages in the nine oil producing states. A contract to be handled by Season Energy Limited.

Allison-Madueke made these disclosures to lawmakers while defending her 2013 budget in a joint session of both House and Senate committees on Gas, Petroleum upstream and downstream yesterday.

Allison-Madueke in her response to lawmakers questions also gave an assurance that the ministry was working hard to address irregularities in the importation of fuel to ward off fuel scarcity during the Christmas festivities.

She also denied having any face off with the Minister of Finance, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, which she said she only read about in the newspapers but lamented poor releases (about 41%) of funds to her ministry by the Finance Minister.

The delay of the cash releases, she said had impacted negatively on her Ministry’s budget performance.

According to Mrs Madueke, the ministry had so far spent N110 million on PIB, but hinted of the Ministry’s readiness to exhaust all its proposals on the planned awareness campaign.

The minister noted that the PIB awareness campaign project was awarded to Hydraulic Research company and that the sum of N94.5 million was spent on the programme in 2010, while N16.3million was released in 2011 and in 2012. The project got a budget of N17.2million.

The oil spillage assessment and documentation project got an allocation of N1 billion in the proposal. N86.6 million was released in 2011 for the project and N179 million was appropriated for it in 2012.

Speaking on the huge outstanding in both cash releases and percentage of projects, she doused fear of failure in her budget for 2012 “out of what was released we were able to handle 93 per cent performance. Of course we expect that the balance of our appropriated budget for 2012 would be released within the 4th quarter and it will allow us within the window of procurement which is up to march next year to complete all our projects that is slated for completion this year and to progress on the ongoing projects for 2012 and go into 2013.”

On the outcome of the Subsidy regime investigation and attending queues in filling stations she responded “We try and ensure verifications in terms of subsidy, the Aig -Imhokuede report have been completed, and payments are beginning to go out to the marketers, you can see already that petrol queues are lessening around the country.

“There have been issues that all Nigerians know. We cannot eat our cake and have it. If we have exposed issues in the payment of fuel subsidy and manipulations in that system, then it has to be adequately investigated. And of course, that investigation meant also that payments phased in until the actual situation was verified.

“Now that that has been done, we hope that after a period we will get back on track in terms of resupplying of petrol to all parts of this country and we will try as much as possible to ensure that there is no logjam in fuel supplies this Christmas.

In 2011, the sum of N110million was notably spent on the controversial PIB which couldn’t float in the sixth National Assembly but elapsed with the Legislature then.

 It would be recalled that the bill was smeared gross clash of interest, threats and intensive lobbying manouvres which the lawmakers themselves found breathe through.