Three days ago, Nigeria’s Junior Finance Minister, Mr Remi Babalola, said that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation is insolvent. The Beeb:

“NNPC is insolvent as current liabilities exceeded current assets by 754bn naira ($5bn; £3.3bn),” Mr Babalola said at a government finance meeting.

He said the NNPC owed about $3bn (£2bn) to Nigeria’s Federation Account, which distributes oil money to varying levels of the country’s government.

Now, this is a company that controls about half of the oil produced by the country.

The federal government replies two days after:

the Minister of Information and Communications, Dora Akunyili, who read out the stand of the FEC at the presidential villa, said though NNPC is a growing concern, it is not broke.

“NNPC, from the auditor’s account, is a going concern, and does not have solvency issue as a corporation. Therefore, categorically, NNPC is not insolvent,” she said.

She added that there is always an outstanding balance between the federal government and the oil giant because of the regular transactions between them.

NEXT’s Tolu Ogunlesi asks:

The billion-naira question now is this: who is to be believed? Mr. Babalola, who, six months after saying he had no doubts about the precarious financial position of the NNPC, is insisting that nothing has changed (that in fact, things have grown worse), or Mrs. Akunyili (on behalf of the Federal Government) and the NNPC, who are telling us that Mr. Babalola has no idea what he is saying.

In case you are unduly puzzled, remember, this is a country that does not know the amount of oil it produces

Sometime ago I wrote a post about my efforts to understand the Nigerian oil industry. Some Next reporters have done an article on their efforts to understand the industry. Nobody seems to know how much Nigerian exports, or how much it makes from oil:

Even a cursory check by NEXT has revealed that various agencies of our government give conflicting figures of how much oil we produce and sell.

The Central Bank, the Ministry of Finance, the Department of Petroleum Resources, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) cannot agree on exactly what the numbers are.

And:

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, our state oil company which enters into joint ventures with the oil multinationals, even goes so far as to say on its website that it cannot be held responsible for the accuracy of the sales figures it publishes.

The Central Bank, which receives the money on behalf of the Nigerian people, also would say nothing regarding the veracity of these numbers.

The Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), the industry regulator, makes the astonishing claim that it does not know the figures.

After more than two weeks of constant calls, text messages and email, the department’s acting director, Billy Agha, informed us through a spokesman that “we only corroborate what NNPC gives to us.”

Oil workers too do not know:

Even oil industry workers don’t have a clue. Peter Esele, former president of the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association, says, “Whatever information that is gotten from the NNPC is from the producers.

“One thing is clear, DPR does not even have the capacity to undergo or even know the quantity of crude. They don’t have a meter, they don’t have a measuring meter. Now, if you go to NNPC, the figure is different, DPR’s is different, producers’ different, CBN is different. So you cannot really reconcile all this.” Esele for a time had served in NEITI.

Peter Akpatason, president National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers, said: “Officially we don’t know. But we have access to the information each time we want to get them.

“But, it is not as if on daily basis, we get the figures. I’m sure you know that there is always discrepancy of some sort between what NNPC declares and what DPR declares.

“What somebody explained to us in DPR is that NNPC figure is taken at the point of production while DPR take theirs at the terminal.”

Really sad state of affairs. The full story is here.