South African media mocking Nigeria

Remember the xenophobia attacks on other Africans, including Nigerians? South Africans are at it again. This time, their media are mocking Nigerians' woes over falling oil prices.  

A South African online media outfit, Mail and Guardian Africa, came after Nigeria on Monday, saying “the money ‘eaten’ there is bigger than the Gross Domestic Product of 38 African nations.”

If the stolen fund it estimated at $50 billion were a country, the online medium reported, it would be Africa’s 11th biggest economy.

“Some estimates put the ‘lost’ funds at $50 billion. If it were a country, it would be Africa's 11th biggest economy, at par with Tunisia's entire GDP and larger than the economic output of Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, Ivory Coast or the Democratic Republic of Congo,” the online report said.

It quoted a Nigeria’s transparency watchdog as saying that “the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation has diverted more than $30 billion oil revenue since 2009.” This figure, it said, was bigger than the annual production output of “half of the nations in Africa.”

Mail and Guardian Africa said the financial shortfall caused by the theft coupled with the falling international oil prices had put Nigeria – a country where “about two-third” of the population live on less than a dollar per day – in a financial strait.

For Nigeria’s investment in the NNPC, the report said, the country had gained nothing but terrible disclosure records and absence of accountability.

“For all its importance to Nigeria, the NNPC is largely inscrutable. It had the worst disclosure record among 44 energy companies analysed in a 2011 report by anti-corruption non-profit organisations, the Transparency International and the Revenue Watch Institute.

“The NNPC consistently denies any wrongdoing. Allegations of missing funds go back as far as when President Muhammadu Buhari was a petroleum minister,” the post recalled.

While it admitted that the country’s oil sector needed an urgent reform, online news organisation said history was not on the side of Buhari’s push to split the corporation.

It described the NNPC as the largest government-owned company, saying Buhari may not succeed in his plan to unbundle it. Arguing that the establishment was synonymous to corruption, it recalled that it had faced allegations bordering financial frauds since 1978. 

“A Lagos-based newspaper reported in 1978, a year after the NNPC took its current name, that the company failed to remit an equivalent of about $3.5 billion it owed the treasury. In the 1990s, a military-sanctioned investigation discovered that $12 billion oil revenue was unaccounted for under the regime of Gen Ibrahim Babangida (retd.).

“The Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative said, at least, $23.2 billion due to the government was not deposited into the federation account from 2009 to 2011. Recently, the then-Central Bank of Nigeria Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, alleged that the corporation retained as much several billions of dollars that was due to the government,” the report narrated.