The Nigerian National Petroleum
Cooperation (NNPC) has denied the request of Femi Falana, lawyer and human
rights acvitist, seeking to know how much revenue Nigeria is getting daily from
the sale of crude oil.
Falana had asked the commission
to disclose the revenue realised from the sale of the daily allocation of
445,000 barrels of crude oil from June 1, 2015 to December 31, 2017.
He also requested the amount
utilised as subsidy and the amount remitted to the federation account from
revenue realised from the crude oil sales within the period.
The lawyer also requested the
quantity of crude oil refined locally and the amount spent on
turn-around-maintenance of local refineries (with vouchers) within the period.
But in a reply dated March 1 and
seen by TheCable, the NNPC told Falana that it is not in a position to provide
him with the information “as your request is incongruous with, unsupported by
and/ or outside the scope and purview of the Freedom of Information Act (with
which he made the request.)”
In the reply signed by Sarah
Ndukwu, general manager, litigation, arbitration and property law department,
the NNPC said: “Be informed that the FOIA is not applicable to NNPC because it
is not a public institution within the meaning of section 31 of FOlA.”.
“The NNPC is neither a
legislative, executive, judicial, administrative nor an advisory body of
government (which the said section applies to); it is a statutory corporation
established for the sole purpose of managing Nigeria’s commercial interest in
oil and gas sector and conducting trade in that respect.”
The commission added even if the
FOIA applies to it, the information sought is “expressly excluded from the
purview of the act by virtue of section 15(1)(a)-(c) thereof.”
It said the requested information
is in the nature of “commercial, financial and trade secrets information, which
obviously are either subject to non-disclosure agreements or whose disclosure
could reasonably interfere with NNPC’s existing contractual obligations or harm
third parties’ interests.
“In fact by the use of the word
“shall” in the section, NNPC is obligated, in the absence of any prior consent
by relevant third parties, to deny your request.”
While assuring Falana that it is
a “law-abiding corporate citizen”, the cooperation further told him that his
request “will not serve any public interest to public health, public safety or
the protection of the environment as to bring it within the items exempted for
disclosure under section 15(4).”
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You all can hear the response from NNPC with respect to Falana request for information regarding their sales transactions on daily allocation of 445,000 barrels of crude oil from June 1, 2015 to December 31, 2017. They still think that Nigerians are fools. We all know what they are hiding. The endemic corrupt practices currently going on in NNPC is unprecedented and that explains why they refuse to respond to a simple and harmless request for information from Falana. There lawyer can speak on the grammar in an attempt to take advantage of the loopholes deliberately created to cover their corrupt tracks during the creation of the FOIA. It's just a question of when. They will all be exposed.
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