WEDNESDAY COLUMN BY USSIJU MEDANER
info@medaner.com, justme4justice@yahoo.com
Facing reality without erupting into emotional diversions is a cardinal virtue we must strive to attain as a people and a nation. It is about time we recognised that as much as presenting a virile opposition is an indispensable component of a functioning democracy. Playing opposition to governance must be done within the boundary of commonsense and national sanity. Getting to the point where the role of opposition is to literally object to, and insist that nothing acceptable is coming from a sitting government is wrong and would not do our nation any good. Rather, it creates a more worrisome commotion and antagonisms to the system of the state.
Nigeria’s oil and gas industry has continued to go through a change system since the termination of the fuel subsidy regime some nineteen months ago. The latter, no doubt, is the main cause of the the unprecedented level of inflation across common baskets of commodities and services nationwide; and we have heard nonstop the reason for the policy direction and the need to accommodate the changes and to allow it to yield the projected outcome. The Dangote refinery, a private entity, has come onboard and we have seen the state owned erstwhile moribund refineries now coming alive and becoming operational one after the other, and the hope that eventually, the industry would finally respond to the needs of Nigerians and the crude oil resources would finally become a blessing to the country, is gradually becoming brighter.
Unfortunately, the opposition to the policy is not abating; those that have chosen to oppose have regardless, maintain their stance. It does not matter to them what positives are coming from the policy, or the glimpses of hope emerging from the implementation; but, we have only continued to see escalation in the opposition, forcing a sizable section of the population to continue to doubt the need for the policy direction. I am wondering what would have been the position of the opposition population if either Peter Obi or Atiku Abubakar had won the 2023 election and removed the fuel subsidy as they have respectively promised during the election campaign. I have no intention of pointing fingers; even if either of them had won and removed the subsidy, the supporters of the sitting president and political party would do exactly what they are doing now.
We now have political bigwigs in our political sphere who are not supposed to be there or at best, be quiet or a bit refined, but who are there and calling the shots because we have made incompetence acceptable, and being paraded without shame; we do dumb things, make crazy blunders, without feeling embarrassed or see the need to either admit or correct our errors. We now run a country where dunderheads like the Obidient group leaders and the bulk of directionless opposition, people and public figures who routinely utter abject nonsense, and oppose everything for the sake of staying relevant, are turned into people who get taken seriously. Going forward, there is the need to sanitise our public sphere. If we continue to tolerate the nature of stupidity being shown in the manner of divisive opposition we currently see, it will flourish, and come with untold negative consequences for our national coherence and development. Or how else do we explain the position of certain politicians to the fuel subsidy removal and the gains already seen in the delicate sector?
We have political leaders who are stopping at nothing to eviscerate societal checks on what is right or wrong. Today, despite the history of atrocities documented against former vice president Atiku Abubakar; the documented inefficiency and abuse of power by the then governor of Anambra state, Peter Obi while in office as the governor of the state, and former President Olusegun Obasanjo, who did not only attempt to illegally offload the national refineries to private entity at an unimaginable ridiculous cost to the nation, but also have boldly submitted that the refineries cannot be turned around to function again, these people are however receiving untold supports from a huge section of our country men and women. The decision to line up behind these men should be embarrassing, but unfortunately to Nigerians, it is not. We must have to stop giving these leaders and this sort of opposition any form of relevance and attention; we cannot continue to make enemies of the country feel comfortable.
The oil industry needs all hands on deck to achieve the projected changes. Decisive actions to create a healthy competition that will positively alter the pump prices to the benefit of Nigerians must be taken and sustained. We must see the full emergence of all national refineries in a very short time from now, and we must offer all assistance to all private refineries under construction. That is the future envisaged by the subsidy removal, and it is attainable, if we all would believe and work towards it.
It is very obvious that if we can only maintain the pace of events the petroleum industry witnesses now, overtime, it would not be out of point, if we buy PMS at a pump price below #600. The deregulation is taking effect; more players are entering the game. We are seeing refineries taking shape across the country, and in no time, the natural force of demand and supply, would alter the pump prices to the benefit of the populace, as expected and promised.
But we won’t get there if we cannot all believe in the process and offer our support. The actions of individuals such as former president Olusegun Obasanjo is uncalled for. It is enough that he had no faith in the country’s capacity to turn around the fate of the state-owned refineries and did not hide it, but to insist on belittling the effort and strings of results as we are beginning to see is wrong, and points more to his sworn hatred and opposition to a government or certain targeted leader. As an elder statesman, he should have known better. Nigerians are no longer interested in the lucky withdrawal of the purported sales of the refineries to the Dangote group in the past at the uneconomical price it was sold for. We would not be able to understand the commonsense of selling off a share of the national properties worth five billion dollars for a mere five hundred million dollars, but it is not important anymore because the sales was stopped when it had to.
Another challenge we must have to find a solution to in the industry is the nonstop incidents of petrol smuggling to our neirgbouring countries. Our fuel cannot continue to cross international borders illegally; it is about time we roundly address this form of crime against the country. The illegal smuggling was one of the few reasons we were forced to end the subsidy regime in the industry in the first place, and now that it appears that we want to begin to see the pump prices responding positively to the deregulation and going downward, the ugly incidents are rearing their heads again.
If we allow this, it will continue to create scarcity domestically and will defeat all the attempts and efforts to lower the pump prices within the country. We have gotten to the point where we must ask ourselves that how do the smugglers get past our lines of security at the border? The only response would be that the majority of those who are supposed to protect the country against such aberrations are literally culpable in the crime against all of us. They look the other way while the criminals cross to the neighbouring nations illegally with the products and line their pockets corruptly with earned returns.
This is the more reason why an officer like Assistant Comptroller Mahmoud Ishida Bello who led the Zone A Operation Whirlwind to recently intercept and confiscated 10970 litres of PMS, without accepting bribes from the culprits deserves all our praises and recommendations. This is not the first time we are seeing such heroic performance on duty from him and his team as he is doing his job as it should be done.
That team should be giving a deserving recognition and be made to serve as an example of what the protection of the integrity of our borders should be to all the security agencies and officers responsible for such critical national role.
