International Institute of Petroleum’s CEO and a former executive at the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Tim Okon, declared that Nigeria spent an estimated b as subsidy on petroleum products out of the 0b earned from crude oil over the course of 5 years since 2010.

This amounts to approximately $7b annual expenditure on subsidies, Punch reported.

Okon hinted that that the billions of dollars spent on subsidising petrol across the country would have been used to fix all the country’s refineries as well as build the Mambilla Power Plant, which has the capacity of generating about 3,000MW of electricity, according to Nawhere.

Okon’s comments came during his keynote speech at the 6th Emmanuel Egbogah Legacy Lecture Series, that was held mid September, with the theme ‘Managing Petroleum Revenue under Volatile Price Dynamics’.

In related news, in December 2015, Nigeria had declared that it will cutback on fuel subsides amid drops in oil productions and declining global prices.