Fuel subsidy lies

Following President Goodluck
Jonathan’s presentation of his
medium term fiscal framework to the
National Assembly in which he
outlined the need for the removal of
fuel subsidy, Nigerians in their
characteristic patriotic interventions
have shouted themselves hoarse on
the short and long term implication of
this anti people and satanic policy.
The truth of the matter is that
President Jonathan is singing the
same worn out melody of deceit like
his predecessors, who used all sorts
of 419 reasons and acronyms in the
past like appropriate pricing,
deregulation, need to curb smuggling,
fuel is cheaper than bottled water,
cartel is benefiting, etc, to raise extra
revenue through the fuel subsidy
removal lies which at the end of the
day did not have any bearing on the
economy but on their pockets.
Nigerians in the light of the modern
age of democracy in which issues
ought to be appropriately and
economically resolved by discourse
rather than force or deceit and lies as
propagated by the federal
government have gone to the extra
mile of requesting the government
that claims its policy is in the peoples
interest to come down from its
Olympian height to organize a public
discourse on this matter that has
taken the front burner of public
discuss and even in our private
homes. But the government in their
characteristic manner of lack of ideas
and fraud has refused to engage
Nigerians intellectually on this policy
but has been rather frivolously
wasting tax payers money on
propaganda that the economy will
collapse because of the money spent
on subsidy in their words could have
been used to provide infrastructures
and that the subsidy is only profiting a
cartel whom we all know are friends
and members of the economic team
of the Jonathan administration.
Nigerian in their millions have asked,
what has the government been able
to do all these years despite all the
budgetary provisions for
infrastructures? The answer is obvious
and it is that the state has collapsed
because those in authority have run
the country like their private estate in
which they have corruptly enriched
themselves at the expense of the
common good. In the last 11 years,
the government claimed to have
spent over 700 million dollars on
turnaround maintenance of the
refineries and yet it is not working at
optimal capacity and those in
positions of authority don’t feel that
the people involved in this scam
should be held accountable? Or was
this money not from the public purse?
Nigerians have also asked those
saddled with the responsibility of
managing the oil industry to come to
the public with facts and figures of
how much it cost to produce a litre of
petrol locally bearing in mind that
Nigeria is the only OPEC member
country where the cost of petrol per
litre is the most expensive because in
Venezuela, a litre is N7, in war torn
Libya, its N27, in desert Algeria, its
N32, to mention but a few.
The cost of building a refinery is
between 14 -19 billion dollars and it
takes less than 3 years as witnessed
by the feat achieved last year 2010
by our neighbour Niger Republic in
which the Nigerian government was
well represented without any remorse
to come back home and do a rethink
of it’s “A ko ti ile ta” (frittering away
ones inheritance) policy.
Taking a cue from the responsible
and responsive government in Niger
Republic, one would have expected
our government whose charity begins
abroad to have embarked on sincere
and genuine rehabilitation of existing
refineries and also the construction of
new functional ones immediately in at
least each of the six geopolitical
zones from the over 500 billion
dollars generated from the sale of
crude oil in the last eleven years as a
crucial step to putting the economy
on track for domestic oil sufficiency.
In the past nine years since 2002, the
Nigerian government awarded over
20 licenses for the building of private
refineries but none was built, rather
all sorts of characters have been busy
building tank farms of which some of
them have entered the Guinness
book of records as the biggest in
West Africa and even Africa because
they want to continue to perpetuate
corruption that is the other name for
Nigeria’s oil industry since it profits to
import low quality and over invoiced
cheap fuel.
In the first place, Nigeria is the sixth
largest producer of black gold and
the only OPEC member country in the
world that exports crude oil and
brings in only refined petroleum
products (PMS). The bye products of
crude oil includes among others
diesel, kerosene, black oil,
polyprothylene which is used for
making rubber, plastics, and other
products which could have enriched
our economy but is lost to this
“Galatians” policy that is fuelled by no
other motive than corruption. Nigeria
is the only OPEC member country that
does not have an accurate data of its
production quota which is mostly
based on assumptions.
The Nigerian National Petroleum
Corruption (NNPC) and its subsidiaries
are the hotbed of corruption because
the body (NNPC) has lost focus of its
primary functions of regulating the oil
industry and has been rather busy
delving into areas not constitutionally
assigned to it like the retailing of
petroleum products by setting up
petrol stations that are not even
functional in most places where they
are situated. The other name for the
Nigerian oil industry is corruption as
captured by revelations at the Senate
hearing on fuel subsidy where it was
discovered that fuel import allocations
were issued to organizations that
were not constitutionally qualified and
subsidy payments made without
corresponding product import. People
are convinced that if the Senate can
do a thorough check of even the
imported fuel by calling in experts,
they will discover that the fuel
importers brought in the lowest and
cheapest grade and thus ripped off
Nigerians, this is apart from the fact
that some of them have committed
economic crimes by conniving with
those in power to collect payments
for products not supplied and quantity
inflated.
The implications of the removal of
fuel subsidy which is the price
Nigerians are being asked to pay for
the corruption and inefficiency of
those in power is to put it mildly
catastrophic because ours is an
economy in which all infrastructures
have collapsed. A lot of businesses
have closed shop and relocated out
of Nigeria because of power, we all
run our homes and offices on
generators, we provide our own
water, education, security, health
facilities, etc. If the regime of higher
petroleum prices is implemented in
the guise of removal of petroleum
subsidy, then it means that smuggling
of petroleum products will be on the
increase since it will be more
profitable, it will also encourage
adulteration of petroleum products,
the remaining surviving industries will
close shop because of higher
suffocating operating cost occasioned
by fuel price hike thus increasing the
unemployment level, cost of goods
and transportation will soar beyond
the reach of the common man and to
summarize, inflation will increase the
poverty level and thus Nigerians as
human beings will have no choice
than to obey the first law of nature
which is self preservation by taking to
crime which is already on the
increase. The security level as at now
is alarming but with a fuel price hike,
the Nigerian society will return to the
Hobbesian state of nature where
anarchy and chaos is the order of the
day. These and many more societal
malaise will rear their ugly heads and
we could all fall victim.
As for the governors who are lazily
clamouring for the removal of fuel
subsidy in order to have more
revenue at the expense of the peace
and economic well being of the
society should better be advised that
their thinking is an escapist solution
to a problem that has come to stay.
Rather, I want them to know that as
at present they are being
shortchanged by the federal
government in the allocation of
resources by the blanket oil subsidy
payment deductions.
Since we are operating a federal
system of government, they should
put in place measures to enable them
calculate how much fuel their state
consumes on a monthly basis and be
deducted accordingly. The present
system is like robbing Peter to pay
Paul since they are even being
cheated by paying for fuel that they
don’t have the statistics to verify. The
governors can even go further by
applying for licenses to build their
own refineries to industrialize their
state and even generate revenue that
would by far surpass their
expectations from this fuel subsidy
removal fraud.