$1bn fuel subsidy is Buhari’s campaign slush fund — Atiku

The presidential candidate of the People Democratic Party, Atiku Abubakar, yesterday alleged that the $1bn voted in the 2019 budget for Petrol-Price-Under Recovery, otherwise known as “fuel subsidy”, was “simply a slush fund to finance President Muhammadu Buhari’s re-election campaign”.

Atiku, in a statement by his Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, also accused the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation of “huge abuse of financial procedures in the running of the state oil company”.

He condemned what he regarded as “the secret and opaque re-introduction of subsidy in the prices of Premium Motor Spirit even before it was provided for in the 2019 budget without any budgetary approval by the National Assembly.”

According to him, the development is now a “proof of the colossal amount of embezzlement and rip-off that have now become the hallmark of the Buhari administration. At the beginning of 2018, the Federal Government illegally diverted $1.05 billion sourced from the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas dividend funds to secretly fund subsidy payment on petroleum products.”

He stated that details of the diversion became public following accusations by the National Assembly that the NNPC had a $3.5bn subsidy fund it was spending without appropriation by the legislature.

“In October, a motion by Senator Biodun Olujimi, (Ekiti-PDP) had triggered debates in the National Assembly on the purported $3.5bn fund alleged to be managed by the NNPC.

“But the NNPC said it had no such fund in its custody. Rather, it said it had a $1.05bn fund it is using to stabilize petrol supply and distribution in the country.

It is on the strength of NNPC’s admission of guilt in the management of the current administration’s subsidy regime that the PDP Presidential candidate asked federal government to refund the $1.05bn which the NNPC admitted was in its custody,” he alleged.

In his reaction, President Buhari, through his spokesman, Femi Adesina, dismissed the allegations, saying it was a sign that Atiku had been defeated in the forthcoming presidential election.

“It is a free world; they can allege when they want to allege. It is a sign of somebody who has been defeated. They find faults in everything. Anybody that knows the nature of this administration and the nature of this president knows that it is a straightforward administration led by a straightforward person. So, anybody that sees crookedness in everything is crooked himself,” Adesina said.