Governor Adams Oshiomhole of Edo state has said that there is nothing personal in his challenge to the erstwhile Minister of Finance, Dr Okonjo Iweala that the true position of things regarding the Excess Crude Account has not been made.
The governor maintained through his spokesman, Kassim Afegbua that: “ much as her Spokesman tried to dramatise his response in defense of his boss, he displayed in his response contrary disposition to issues of simple economics of naira and kobo.”
He said the Minister had changed her position on the issue of the said $2.1billion ECA fund several times, and that warranted the response from his office.
The statement read in part: “the simple questions which the Comrade Governor asked were: how come those accruals into the Excess Crude Account got depleted without the knowledge of the National Economic Council? How come monies that were supposed to accrue into the said account cannot be found in it going by the balance sheet provided by the former Minister? How come the Minister unilaterally dipped her hand into the Excess Crude Account to spend money in defiance of the constitution and the laws of the land? How come that the Minister finds it convenient to publish allocations to States and Local Governments, but refused to publish accruals into the same account for us to know the status of the account at any point in time; how much was left from where she was distributing from?”
The statement added: “what the Comrade Governor stated was that; it was interesting to note that by December 2012, the ECA had a balance of over $10 billion. This had been depleted to $2.07billion by May 2015, according to the former Finance Minister. Between January 2013 and May 2015, not more than $4billion was shared among the three tiers of Government. Indeed, the last time any money was shared from the ECA was in May 2013”.
“flowing from the above statement of facts, the Comrade Governor then asked a very pertinent question; how come there was no accretion to the ECA even when Crude oil prices averaged between $100 to $108 within the three years period of 2011 to 2014, aware that the National Budgets were based on $77 and $79 benchmark? That gives an average of $30 per barrel gains. In fact, based on rough estimates, Nigeria should earn not less than $30billion accretion based on the official oil exports of 2.3 million barrels per day. The question which Okonjo-Iweala could not answer is; how come Nigeria did not make any savings during those three years of unprecedented oil price boom? Simple question that should ordinarily elicit simple response.”
The governor warned that without a scintilla of numerical reference, Okonjo-Iweala went into a voyage of storytelling, leaving out the real substance of the Comrade Governor’s salient questions, and recalled that first, the Minister responded on May 28, 2015 where she denied the allegations describing them as “baseless”.
According to Oshiomhole, among other things the former Minister claimed that the 36 State Governors who are joint owners of the Excess Crude Account [ECA] with the Federal Government were in full picture of how the ECA was managed.
Governor Oshiomhole claimed that on June 29, 2015 exactly a month after, the inaugural meeting of the National Economic Council [NEC] presided over by Vice President Professor Yemi Osibanjo, with 36 states in attendance deliberated on the status of the ECA, and that after a critical scrutiny, it was discovered that indeed Dr. Okonjo-Iweala spent $2.1billion from the ECA without authorization by the NEC.
“That money was neither distributed to states nor paid to the three tiers of government. This was the rationale for the setting up of the four-man Panel to look at what accrued, what it was spent for, when and by whom and who authorized the spending, so that Nigerians will have full picture of all the transactions as regards the much talked about Excess Crude Account.”, the governor’s aide maintained in the statement.