Where is the PwC full report on NNPC?

The report was presented to President Jonathan February 2, by PWC’s country senior partner, Uyi Akpala and the Risk and Quality Leader for Africa, Gabriel Ukpeh and was ordered by Nigeria’s minister of Finance Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala after a former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, blew the whistle on a possible disappearance of $60 billion from the NNPC coffers and presumably stolen by officials in collusion with some local oil companies.

So where is the full report, why has it not been made public yet? This question won’t just go away. The country demands to know, the people need to know what the truth is.

All previous report suggests something fishy. It is either small money missing or big money missing. Remember, the other time, the debate is whether the corporation was broke or bankrupt. This time it is about whether the behemoth has gobbled $20 billion dollars  (could be $60 billion) or not- money huge enough to build an entire new city equipped with all known modern living facilities and ‘plenty’  new refineries across the country.

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) is really turning out to be the biggest global audit failure, much bigger than Enron. The stories out of the corporation on a daily basis is not about it’s technical prowess but stories akin to that of Enron shortly before its collapse in 2001- the use of accounting loopholes, special purpose entities, poor financial reporting and very high risk accounting practices, to tell compelling lies about its books. 

Like the best movies, the corporation is a tale of suspense on how corruption can be covered up and how you can manage the crisis that erupts from being sordid. It has since 2012 been enmeshed in filthy drags about missing monies, admonitions and indictments.

It has severally been subject of inquiries in connection with scam, indefinitely embroiled in it. I need not recount the tons of money gone missing since then but all of that suggests that the corporation is sick-either from mismanagement or chronic corruption. But besides their sickness, the corporation is an amazing entity of shameless leadership. That it has not thought of a way after all these years to re-brand away from the stinking image of cesspool is baffling.

But I think there is even a more seductive narrative for an NNPC chastened by the disappearance of multi-billion dollars from its accounts. If the citizen’s demands and perceptions are sometimes provocative and mostly aggressive, we should be mindful of the circumstances. Perhaps, the authority (the federal government) superintending over the corporation has indeed broken the boundaries of mendacity or even have legitimized it in this case. Maybe it chooses to randomly push forward the corporation for untoward attacks. It is a known fact that all the NNPC men are appointed by the federal government and so are simply ‘yes men’ who don’t know what they are saying yes to. I have made this point in the past.

It is really on the government to see that the audit report is released to the public- not the NNPC. So it could be the federal government, stupid and chronically corrupt. This is what seems to have happened always. Not a single government official prefers confronting the corporation’s accounting processes. What we get are too many official lies and broken promises.

Conspiracy theories are everywhere about the missing monies, how NNPC is managed, who is really in charge, the presidency’s involvement, the role of the supervising minister, the National Assembly and a host of other thinly veiled co-conspirators. Yet all of these are fed by the attitude displayed by all of those mentioned.

The ministers, both the coordinating minister and the petroleum minister have performed gallantly and brilliantly as well in their stand up against the quantum of money stolen from the NNPC. They did not say money is not stolen but the money stolen in not ‘plenty’. After all, one of them initiated the PwC audit examination. The Group Managing Director of the NNPC, Andrew Yakubu prefers then to berate Sanusi as a politician playing politics with figures. He did not provide any concrete response to the allegation thrown at the corporation he heads by Sanusi. Remember the Markafi report on NNPC? That has totally been buried. Forgotten! Even the Senate in 1014 came up with their own mathematics to arrive at $20 billion, in the process exonerating the Presidency. The list of the defenders of NNPC stolen money is endless. All of these lend support to a deep-seated conspiracy and government ‘hand-of god’ in NNPC.

But the result is a host of practiced deception, which will certainly not sway perceptions about an institution so corrupted by those who swore to protect it.

Charles Ike-Okoh