 The House of Representatives and the ad hoc committee investigating alleged missing crude oil has summoned the Attorney General of the Federation and the Minister of Justice, Abubakha Malami, over $200 million paid to consultants. The chairman of the committee, Mark Bila, representing Labour Party, Benwe, issued the summon on Wednesday during the public hearing on the matter at the National Assembly while summoning the duo, Mr. Bila, stated that a whistle-blower informed the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit that Mr. Malami approved the payment of $200 million to two private companies for consultancy services. Meanwhile, the Minister of Finance, Butters and National Planning, Zainab Ahmad, recently announced that Nigeria had secured a World Bank loan facility worth $800 million. According to her, the $800 million is the first tranche of palliatives to be disbursed through cash transfers to about 50 million Nigerians who belong to the most vulnerable category in society. Joining us to discuss this and more is Nick Agulay, he's a financial analyst. Thank you so much, Mr. Agulay, for joining us. Good evening. Thank you very much for having me. Great. Good evening to all of you. Yes. Let's start by addressing the question that's on everybody's mind. We're very indebted, as we speak, and I'm sure that many people who are listening will say, oh, well, so is the United States, so is France, so is the United Kingdom. But in Nigeria's case, we're borrowing monies to dash for the want of a better way to say it, as opposed to using it to multiply or build infrastructure or develop. And so I want to start by asking, why are we getting an extra $800 million? And what exactly is this money supposed to be used for? Thank you very much for that question. Before I will tackle your question about the $800 million, let me first touch on the opening remark that you have made regarding our borrowings. You also say that other countries, citing the likes of the U.K., U.S. and elsewhere, are also borrowing either ignorant or mischievous because there is a cardinal principle about borrowing, and that is you have to have a project to commit that borrowing to anybody who is borrowing to feed is in trouble, is in financial crisis. That is the first thing. The second thing is your ability to repair your loan. Anywhere you go, anywhere at all, you go to a bank or a financial institution and you want to take a loan. That bank or financial institution is going to look at your finances and check that you are able to repay that loan. If you are not able to repay that loan, then regardless of what you want to use the loan for, regardless of your net worth, the bank or financial institution is going to decline, giving you the loan. A country that is using 96% of its total earnings just to service debts, 96% or whatever the country earns, and that is Nigeria, is used in servicing debts, meaning the rest of the expenditure of this country, including recurrent expenditure, which involves payment of salaries, travels, office costs, and all of those kind of things, are being financed with borrowing, is in financial catastrophe. There is no bank, and I'm really surprised, moving over to the World Bank now, that the World Bank will consider giving Nigeria this loan. I am not sure if Nigeria actually was honest with the World Bank for the reason that they were seeking this loan for. A country that cannot manage its borrowings right now is seeking nearly a billion dollars and therefore what purpose? That they want to make cash transfers to households because of fuel subsidy that will be removed. Fuel subsidy has not been removed. They have already left fuel subsidy remover to the next government, and it therefore becomes unclear, if not dubious, for a government that for eight years could not come to the decision to remove fuel subsidy, to now start borrowing at the twilight of their regime. With only about a month or so to go, borrowing such humongous money to share to people when we have no way as Nigerians, to even determine the people that they have shared this thing to. That side of the argument is that why not borrow the eight hundred million dollars and commit it into fixing one of the refineries, one of the refineries, and get it to start working so that when the refinery is working, automatically the cost of fuel will come down. Nick, can you hear me? Refining locally. Yeah. Nick, can you hear me? Yes, I can. Recently, monies had been allotted for the fixing, or rather, maintenance of those refineries that you speak of. The question that was posed at the time, I think about a trillion plus, was allocated. The question that was asked was, why are you servicing refineries that are not working and paying salaries to people who are working in a refinery that's not refining any products? So, I don't know if adding this eight hundred million to it is going to solve any problem. I really don't know. I agree with you. I honestly agree with you because I think, was it 2021 or so, the honorable minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Timi Prey, Siva, Dan, the former, he told us that they have signed a contract worth, I think, $1.5 billion to fix the Pohakot refinery. And that contract was to run for a period of about 18 months, meaning by now, that refinery should be up and running. As we are speaking today, as we say in Nigeria, that project has entered voicemail. Everybody is even talking about it. The minister of State himself recently left his job to run for governorship of his State in Biasa without giving us a scorecard of his time in office, including where he is with that refinery that he said $1.5 billion have been committed to. So I agree with you entirely that the Nigerian government has proved over time that they are incapable of handling the downstream petroleum sector in Nigeria. And that is why we have been advocating all this while, that the downstream sector of the petroleum industry in Nigeria should be handed over to the private sector. In the same way we handed over telecoms to the private sector, and today, as much as we cannot say we have the best telecommunication services in the world, what we have today is far, far better than the days of nighttime when government was doing this thing by themselves. So yes, you are right to say that the monies, this $800 million could have been money that was sourced from the private sector to come in and fix the refinery. There is no solution to few subsidies other than fixing the refineries in Nigeria. Let's move away from that. Let's talk numbers now, because what the finance minister has said is anything to go by then. Let's do some mathematics. I'm not so great at it, but I'll try my best. Now if they diligently decide to share this $800 million at the exchange rate of about 750 Naira to the dollar, which is, I don't know if that's ever changing, it means that Nick, every recipient will have just about $16, which is about 12,000 Naira each. Now with the current consumer price index by the National Bureau of Statistics on food inflation, which is at 24% to 32%, what relief does this $12,000 Naira bring to the average Nigerian and for how long, really, because when you pump in that amount, especially within a short period, the purchasing power of $12,000 will drop because of inflation. So what exactly is the federal government playing at here? You are 100% correct, even in your maths and in what you have said about this policy. This policy of sharing $800 million of borrowed money to Nigerians, and yet we don't even have a register of those Nigerians, is the most laughable and myopic project that this government will embark on in its 80-year history. Like you have rightly said, let us assume that this $800 million is about to be distributed and few subsidies have been removed and petrol is selling at, say, $1 a liter. At $1 a liter, that will be at the parry market rate at $750 Naira a liter, as you rightly said. Now, if petrol moves from the current regulated price of $1.95 to $750 Naira, there will be a big shock to the economy, a very big shock, prices of goods and services with skyrocket. And then residents will now get $12,000 Naira or equivalent, one-off payment. So after that one-off payment finishes and petrol prices still remain at $750 Naira a liter. What is going to happen to Nigerians thereafter? This is the question that these policy makers have not answered. And that is why this policy is very timid on paper as it is, it is timid, it is unsustainable, it is not going to do anything. Nigerians will simply be thrown under the bus. I want to just go back again to when this story first broke. I'm wondering why at first the government was shrouding it in so much secrecy. In fact, they told us at first we were misinformed that it was a grant, not until business day newspaper, and I think budget established that it was a loan to be paid between 2027 and 2051. In fact, for whatever is worse, Nick, the federal government has been asked to deceased from taking this loan, but they won't heed such advice because you know that there will be vested interests in every way. But I'm curious, will we be able to recover from this? I mean, I'm just trying to understand, is there more to this than meets the eye? Is there something that someone somewhere stands to gain from it? Because we're splurging in terms of these loans and our debt is increasing. And will we be ever able to recover from what this blow that the government has dealt us and our economy? It will be difficult to recover. This loan, if it goes ahead, our children, their own children and their own grandchildren will still be paying for the effects of this loan. And what we need to do is to stop the government, the current government that is about to leave office from taking this loan. The current government at this time should be concerned with writing their handover notes and packaging the handover to a new government on the 29th of May. They are not even the ones that are going to remove the subsidy. They don't even know if the incoming government will remove the subsidy because they have already transferred the responsibility for this subsidy remover to the next government. So they should just allow the next government to decide on how they want to do it. If the next government decides not to remove the subsidy and this government in power today has already borrowed and distributed 800 million dollars, then to what effect? But if the next government decides that they want to remove subsidy, they can have their own approach on how they want to remove the subsidy. They could first and foremost start by saying, we are handing over all these refineries to operators, to global operators in the downstream to come in and fix our four refineries and flood the market with petroleum products so that the price will automatically come down. That could be a route that the incoming government will take. So this government must be stopped from taking this loan. And the agitation for them to stop from taking this loan has to start right from the World Bank. The World Bank that says they are giving or the IMF that say that they are giving this loan of 800 million dollars must be asked not to do it because they as a bank should know that there is no reason for an outgoing government to commit the nation and the people of Nigeria to such a humongous loan without them being in office to generate the revenue to repay the loan. We also have to have a civil society stepping here. There are other arms of government. This thing is being perpetrated by the executive arm of government. And there are other arms of government including the judiciary. I expect cases to be filed at courts to obtain injunctions against the government from taking this loan. I expect also the members of the National Assembly need to be reached out to so that they will pass motions to stop this government from taking this loan. How do you expect this to happen? Because we know whether we like it or not, unfortunately, the majority in these houses are of course the party that's in power. Whether we like it or not, it looks like seemingly we have some sort of a robber stamp legislature. And you just played into my last question to round off here. What should not your civil society be doing? But even with the Nigerians that might be suffering the consequences of these indebtedness, what must we do to make sure that these monies are accounted for in one minute? Let's hear it. So for us as Nigerians, we just need to agitate. There has to be widespread agitations to stop the government from taking the loan in the first place. Because if we are fighting for accountability, this government has shown in its 80A lifespan that they have zero accountability to Nigerians. This government is a government that we have heard of theft of our crude oil, and nobody as of today has been heard accountable. This is a government that have taken loans upon loans in the past. We have not heard anything about that. This is a government that is even being accused now that oil processes were sold and pocketed by certain individuals, and nobody has been done. So it is very difficult to hold this government accountable. What they simply need to do and as Nigerians, we must go on mass protests either to our members of the National Assembly. You mentioned members of the National Assembly. You see, more than 80% of them are not coming back. So even though they are members of the ruling party, they have already been injured for not coming back. So let them use this as a parting gift to us to get back to the government, get back at the government by stopping the taking of this law. All right, Nika Gule, always a pleasure to have you here. Nika Gule is a financial analyst. We're hoping and trusting that something good comes out of this. Have a good evening, and thanks for joining us. Thank you very much, and good evening to all of you. All right. Well, that's the show today. We want to thank you for being part of the conversation. If you've missed any of our programs, go to our YouTube page at Plus TV Africa. Subscribe, and you will not miss any of our programs. Then follow us on all our social media handles at Plus TV Africa. I am Mary Anna Connell. I'll be back tomorrow with more stories from our political scene. Have a good evening.