When the Federal Government on Wednesday March 20 said the country’s economy would be truncated if the full deregulation of the downstream sector of the petroleum industry was not carried out, it became very obvious that the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan has made up its mind to keep conducting its business by drifting from one manufactured crisis to the next. Is it not funny that the President’s declaration came barely 24 hours from an Abuja Federal High Court ruling that declared deregulation illegal? Was the President waiting to hear the court ruling before telling us that the whole country would collapse if we don’t allow him to fully deregulate the nation’s downstream oil sector?
When the Federal Government on Wednesday March 20 said the country’s economy would be truncated if the full deregulation of the downstream sector of the petroleum industry was not carried out, it became very obvious that the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan has made up its mind to keep conducting its business by drifting from one manufactured crisis to the next. Is it not funny that the President’s declaration came barely 24 hours from an Abuja Federal High Court ruling that declared deregulation illegal? Was the President waiting to hear the court ruling before telling us that the whole country would collapse if we don’t allow him to fully deregulate the nation’s downstream oil sector?
By the way, if deregulation was rejected in January last year not because it was a bad idea, but because it was ill-timed, what has changed in the seasons and times of the economy and governance of this nation or in the welfare of its people to have warranted a revisit to this sore issue?
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It was good that the Presidency itself openly acknowledged that “Nigerians had become cynical about government policies because past governments failed them.” Though what the Jonathan man – Labaran Maku failed to add was that Nigerians are not only cynical with the present government, they are outrightly vexed by the continuing irresolution of this administration which seems to have made so much effort at nothing.
In as much as majority of Nigerians oppose the continued siphoning of our collective wealth by just few people in and near the Presidency, the assertion by the federal government that “without deregulation, you will never have a sustainable downstream sector of the economy; we cannot generate jobs in the sector; and we cannot have an orderly market,” was an outright rubbish and an expression of a disabled or rather clueless government.
In the words of the Information Minister: “If we insist that government is the one that will be refining products for the Nigerian market, we will remain truncated. The potential the oil and gas sector is supposed to unleash on this country has been completely truncated.
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“The government money that should have been used for development is paid to marketers, who turn around to get more money from Nigerians; so, in the end, the government and Nigerians are losing, the sector is also losing.”
First, why has it become an impossible task for the federal government to fully resuscitate the nation’s existing three and half refineries at Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna?
How can the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) claim that national demand for fuel particularly gasoline (petrol) is so high that even if the three and half refineries work at full installed capacities and refine 445,000 barrels of crude oil per day, the country would still have to import additional 12 million litres of petrol to augment in-country production? So what is stopping the three and half refineries from working even at near full installed capacity? Let the NNPC achieve that feat first and then we begin to find ways of bridging the shortfall that is if there is any.
Does anybody in government know the exact volume of fuel –petrol, diesel and kerosene consumed domestically on daily, weekly, and monthly basis in this country? The answer is no! The figures dangled so far as volumes of petrol and diesel consumed domestically were mere wild guesses derived from the wildest imaginations of those in government who want to justify the huge amount expended on the subsidy racket. Nobody has an iota of idea on the exact or scientifically derived volume of petroleum products consumed in-country on daily basis not even a near estimate.
What can the government say it has done so far to encourage private participation in the refining subsector of the nation’s downstream oil sector? Over 25 licenses for the building of privately-owned refining plants were doled out to people who say they were interested in investing in the refining subsector, how many has gone beyond the stage of just collecting the licenses and how many are still serious about actually building new plants? Funny enough, most of these licensees are the same people at the forefront of importing petroleum products from all sorts of places.
Most of the would-be investors complained to the federal government on the issue of sourcing/availability of crude oil feedstock for the proposed plants, has the government taken any serious step not only to assure the investors but actually kick-start the process of securing crude oil from producers to be used as feedstock for these proposed plants?
The last time attempts were made to completely withdraw subsidy on petroleum products in January 2012, the federal government came up with a palliative package which they called Subsidy Reinvestment Programme (SURE-P). Today, the activities of the programme could best be described as blurred and at worst obscured as according to a colleague of mine, SURE-P has ended up creating more SURE-thieves. That is governance in Nigeria for you!
Without a genuine determination to address the serious problem of corruption by people in and around government in this country, no economic policy- whether full or over-full deregulation would ever work to produce desired goals. In a situation where people in government are seen to be aiding and as well as deeply involved in corruption, government would be deceiving itself by expecting full cooperation from the ordinary people who sees their leaders as enemies.
And as rightly warned by an analyst, our clueless leaders should be informed and in a plain language too that if the nation’s economy collapses because of the rejection of full deregulation and stealing of our monies as said, the real Nigerian people will move to recover their monies from the hands of everyone who has been involved in governance directly or by proxy. Those who have ears let them hear!
(IFEANYI IZEZE is an Abuja-based Consultant and can be reached on:[email protected];
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of SaharaReporters
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