Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, on Thursday evening further clarified his statement that he approved the N640bn contracts of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), in reaction to the face-off between the state-owned oil giant and its supervisory Ministry of Petroleum Resources.
Clarifying the statement made earlier by his office, Osinbajo who was fielding questions from reporters after the ground-breaking multi-billion Naira Bonny-Bodo road project which links Bonny Island in Rivers State, said the approval granted the NNPC while he was acting President were for financing arrangements for the Joint Ventures involve the NNPC and international oil companies and not contracts.
The road project, according to his Laolu Akande, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media & Publicity, is part of the over N1.2tr infrastructure spend of the Muhammadu Buhari administration in the 2017 budget.
After a brief tour of Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) plant, the Vice President visited the palace of Amanayabo of Grand Bonny Kingdom King Edward Asimini William, ahead of the ground-breaking.
Welcoming the Osinbajo and his team, the Amanayabo said the road project is very important to his community, while the Vice President responded: “Bonny is very important to Nigeria and this project is part of the Niger Delta New Vision (of the Muhammadu Buhari administration).
Speaking at the ground-breaking ceremony, Osinbajo said the idea of Bonny-Bodo project is 40 year-old, but was not implemented even when Nigeria was making $100 per barrel per day from sale of crude oil.
A tweet by the Presidency, the Bodo-Bonny Bridge “will cost N120bn and will be funded 50% each by FG and the NLNG.”
According to the Vice President the JV arrangements “were financing loans. Of course, you know what the Joint Ventures are, with the lOCs, like Chevron, that had to procure. In some cases, NNPC and their Joint Venture partners have to secure loans and they need authorisation to secure those loans while the President was away. The law actually provides for those authorisations. So I did grant two of them and those were presidential approvals, but they are specifically for financing joint ventures and they are loans not contracts.”
The Vice President’s office had earlier in the day tweeted that “in response to media inquiries on the NNPC Joint Venture financing arrangements, VP Osinbajo, as Acting President, approved the recommendations after due diligence and adherence to established procedures. This was, of course, necessary to deal with huge backlog of unpaid cash calls which the Buhari administration inherited, and to incentivize much needed fresh investments in the oil and gas sector,” he noted.