Business Post Contributor
By Precious Olisa
The Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) has said the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited only remitted 57.27 per cent of the revenue it generated in 2021 to the federal government.
The agency made this claim in a report released earlier this week, noting that the country generated $23.05 billion from the oil and gas sector in 2021 compared with the $20.43 billion achieved in 2020, with the NNPC and others keeping some funds back.
Analysis showed that about $8.67 billion came from the sale of crude oil and gas, $13.37 billion was from taxes and other specific revenue flows, and $1.01 billion was from payments to sub-national entities.
In the report, it was stated that none of the refineries was operational in the period under review despite the N200 billion spent between 2020 and 2021 for rehabilitation, which was deducted from the federation sales proceeds, which remains a high cost to federation revenue remittances, according to NEITI.
In addition, the report said about $1.95 billion of the total revenue was not transferred to the federation account by the NNPC in 2021.
A breakdown of the withheld revenue included $722.6 million for NLNG dividend, $871.15 million from domestic crude sales, $859,583 miscellaneous revenue and $286.42 million from export crude sales, while $24.332 million and $45.76 million were withheld from transportation revenue and domestic gas proceeds, with $6.931 billion used as expenditure.
Presenting the highlights of the report in Abuja, the Executive Secretary of NEITI, Mr Orji Ogbonnaya Orji, lamented that despite the concerted efforts made last year to recover some of the revenues through the ad hoc committee instituted by the National Assembly, the 2021 figures showed an increase.
He called for the collaboration between the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) in the recovery of outstanding NDDC levies, stating that there would be a need for further reconciliations of payments made by companies to EFCC to determine amounts recovered and amounts outstanding (if any) in the EFCC account because the NDDC could not provide independent records of such payments.
