The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Timipre Sylva has insisted that the Federal government will not pay the $9.6billion judgment fine to Process and Industrial Developments Limited (P&ID).
A British Court in a judgment had slammed the fine on the Federal government in favour of the Virgin Islands-registered company, earlier this year.
The contract required the Nigerian government to pay $300 million for P&ID to set up a way to turn a dirty form of natural gas burned off during oil production into electricity for use by local governments.
Sylva while defending the Petroleum Ministry 2020 budget before a joint-committee of the National Assembly on Petroleum Resources on Thursday said the P& ID contract is fraudulent and Nigeria will not pay” the fine.
He told the Joint Committee headed by Bassey Akpan (Akwa Ibom-PDP), that the Ministry was determined to fix all the refineries in the country, before 2023.
The Minister assured Nigerians that the Federal Government has no plan to remove fuel subsidy, adding that the petroleum consumption rate being posted daily does not reflect the actual consumption of the country.
“This government is not about to remove subsidy because it is difficult, we believe as a government that our people are going though a lot issues.
We cannot as a responsible government hip another issue of petroleum price hike or removal of subsidy on Nigerians. It is not on the cards at all, we are just looking at how we can manage it,” he said.
Speaking on the declaration of Anambra as an oil producing state by President Goodluck Jonathan, Sylva said there were a lot of things that were left undone that would have benefited the new status of the state.
He however, said the Ministry was in the process of amending the Deep Shore Act that would address the such lacuna and missed opportunity and disclosed that Bauchi state was on its way to becoming an oil producing state following recent discovery of oil in commercial quantity in the state.
Akpan on his part, also assured the Ministry that the Senate and the House of Representatives are committed to supporting the President in his efforts in the oil and gas sector.
The Committee frowned at the failure of DPR, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and other agencies in the Ministry to appear before the Committee and expressed worry that DPR is “grossly understaffed”.
Meanwhile, the National Primary Healthcare Development Agency has revealed that only N1.6 billion out of N7.6 billion appropriated in the 2019 budget of the agency has been released.
Executive Secretary of the Agency, Faisal Shauibu
during budget defense before the House of Representatives Committee on Health Services.
Shauibu told the Committee that the Agency is seriously developing and supporting the implementation of a comprehensive national primary healthcare scheme throughout the country.
Chairman of the House Committee, Tanko Sununu called on the Agency to work assiduously towards improving child and maternal healthcare in all parts of Nigeria.
Sununu who noted that N7.6 billion was budgeted by the agency for the imporovement of child and maternal healthcare, control of preventable diseases and and improvement of access to healthcare in 2019 asked it to do more in these tasks.
He stated that polio eradication initiative by the agency had gulped N21 million and procurement of vaccines was at N292M for its prevention and queried the agency as to what level of support they are getting from Development partners for the healthcare needs of the citizens of Nigeria.
James Kwen, Abuja
