Diezani Alison-Madueke has, again, reaffirmed that during her tenure she stole no money. Her tenure as minister has been shrouded by controversy that will take years to live down.

She disclosed this in an interview with ThisDay where she also opened up on some other issues like her accomplishments and the structural problems of the petroleum sector, Emir Mohammad Sanusi II and the $20 billion question, the PwC forensic audit, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

Here are 10 things we learnt from her interview:

1. She worked on giving NNPC full autonomy
   

   “So when we came in 2010 to 2011, the intent was to very quickly look at ways and means to open up NNPC in particular, because NNPC is the core parastatal with operational and legal parameters binding it. The NNPC Act gives it operational independence and gives the Group Managing Director a lot of powers as well. So we moved very quickly to try and ensure that we moved it towards what we would consider an entity that operated along private sector lines. In other words, we tried immediately to move it, even with our first reform processes, before we even went into the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) to try and pull out areas that were inherent in the original PIB for reform processes. Some of the measures such as the Gas Master Plan, Local Content Act, amongst other areas, were introduced. I think we did that all very successfully and we immediately ensured the passage of the Local Content Bill and moved aggressively to establish that, against a lot of push back from multinationals and other established oil and gas entities, especially the foreign ones.”

2. She also tried to structure the Gas aspect of the sector.
   

   ” On the other hand, we moved straight into the Gas Master Plan and pulled it out of what was originally the PIB. Now, the Gas Master Plan when we pulled it out ensured that we began to look at things from a very structured way of how we deploy gas, and gas infrastructure particularly for the purpose of supplying domestic gas in Nigeria because it was quite clear that over the years, government had sort of gotten it wrong in terms of domestic gas. Whereas we were doing very well in terms of our export LNG potential and the revenue derived from that, in terms of domestic gas, we had not put infrastructure in place to even pipe that gas to the various independent power plants (IPPs) which were to come on stream over these next few years and in fact as you know, have been coming on stream over the last few years. So we came in 2010- 2011 to find out that there was no infrastructure for our gas pipelines and we therefore had to go backwards and begin to ensure that we established that pipeline infrastructure and over the last four years, we have put in place almost 500 kilometres of gas pipelines without which we could not possibly begin to service all the requisite independent power plants with the required gas that we were trying to ensure goes from gas-to-power. Now, because this was not done when it should have been done, which should have been in the last seven to eight years, it meant that we were working backwards and we engaged entities such as the International Finance Corporation (IFC) to help us with the feasibility studies and later on to bring in financiers for investment purposes in the pipeline infrastructure.”

3. She thinks she sorted out tarriffing and pricing.
   

   “Again, on the gas side, we did pretty well in terms of the basic domestic gas tariffing and pricing; it was a fundamental area we had to address from the beginning and as you know we went into various areas of tariffing to ensure that we got to a point where our gas pricing for domestic gas was competitive with anywhere else in the world.”

4. She tried to eliminate subsidy.
   

   “when we realised the problem we were going to have in the sector and this was to try to move away from the areas where we thought there was inherent corruption and non-transparency in the sector. And one of the key areas from the time we came in, was the area of subsidy payments. We said from the beginning that the subsidy on petroleum products was not addressing the root cause of the problems that it was put in place to address. In view of this, in November 2011, I signed to remove 92 throughput marketers from the list of PPPRA (Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency), through whom PMS (petrol) allocations were made because it was becoming clear to us that among these throughput marketers, it appeared that round-tripping, among other sharp practices were taking place.”

5. She created the PIB to regulate and solve the issue of corruption in the sector.
   

   “Again, there was an area where there was clear malpractice, clear corruption being meted through this process and again we moved to remove it at that time. We moved from that very speedily again by trying to reform NNPC, so we revamped the PIB in 2012. I sat nights and days with the committee handling the PIB in a bid to create a bill that will truly unbundle NNPC, which would for the first time create a national oil company that could operate along private sector lines, that would have private equity holdings, that would ensure that NNPC or the national oil company would have to answer to the Nigerian people in terms of its equity shareholding and because of that, would have to operate like every other competitive private company – it would have to make its revenue, its profits and its books would be open for the entire country to look at and peruse.”

6. She tried privatising the refineries to help boost the sector.
   

   “…we moved in 2013, prepared the framework for the privatisation of the refineries to ensure that indigenous players could come in and turnaround our refineries, recreate them and begin to give us the needed distribution and supply of products. With the president’s approval, we moved on this aggressively.”

7. “They” didn’t let her carry out her reforms.
   

   “Unfortunately, as we tried to deploy it, there was a major push back again, this time from the unions, who were completely against the privatisation of our refineries. Unfortunately, as I pointed out, on virtually every of these fronts, we were pushed back very strongly and aggressively by the same polity that we were trying to protect by moving forward with these major changes in the fabrics of the oil and gas sector.”

8. She did her own audit report.
   

   “We have gone through the pretence of reforms over the last 30 years and I can assure you that this is the first time we are had an open audit, a forensic audit that has been open and has been shown to the entire world. Before this forensic audit, we did one two years ago, another PwC audit which I directed to ensure that we looked at all our process issues and tried to find out where we had problems and it showed up quite a few gaps. I know what I saw when I came in 2010-2011, in terms of the auditing process of the NNPC and the sort of accounting systems that they had been carrying. If we do not go down and continuously revamp and update the systems and processes, there is no way you can stand side by side with organisations such as Saudi Aramco which are constantly reinventing themselves.”

9. She feels deregulation would have worked for the economy.
   

   “Well, like I said before, it has to be deregulated. Take away the subsidy and let the market parameters of supply and demand come into play whether it is DPK or household kerosene. I think until that happens, we are not going to achieve a clear landing where kerosene is concerned. Secondly, we still have to come back to the fact that we must get our security agencies to assist us in terms of vandalism and sabotage. I know it is difficult.”

10. She wasn’t involved in the PwC forensic report.
    

    “the PwC forensic audit was put in place by the Auditor-General of the Federation and not by me. So the full deployment of the forensic report was not under my purview at all. We saw the summary just as everybody else saw the summary and at some point, we had to request the full details to be able to look at it as well. So the timing of the release of the audit had nothing to do with the Minister of Petroleum Resources. But we felt all along that the full report should have been released from the get go, so that Nigerians would have an opportunity to look at it. I had said from the beginning that at any point in time, the NNPC should be absolutely open for audit of any type.”

Janeth J