OIL AND POWER

Immediate-past President Goodluck Jonathan said during the valedictory Federal Executive Council session, last Wednesday that the record protests and strikes witnessed during his tenure as president was politically motivated! This clearly shows that the man truly did not understand the pain and frustrations that his administration was visiting on us.  Quite honestly, the past six years’ experience is what no Nigerian should ever have to experience again. His comments about not being singled out for probe as it would amount to a witch-hunt, is in itself, well, self-indicting!

      

Let us not dwell on corruption itself, as enough has been said about this ill already. What we have to do now is to start putting those checks and balances in place. We should start with our current petrol crisis. The scarcity which all but shut down the entire nation last week has shown that the petroleum industry is by far the most critical factor that is stifling our development. In 2011, Jonathan promised the overhaul of the industry. He promised us massive infrastructural development and availability of petroleum products; all we had to do was agree to his plan to remove subsidy and the development of our gas resources to boost our energy needs would be a priority. Erratic power supply would thereby become a thing of the past. SURE-P became a policy mantra upon which they sold us lies. Four years after the removal of subsidy (and even when oil prices crashed on the international market) we are still paying billions of naira to petrol importers who, wielding their powers and influence, are able to bring us to our knees in a matter of days. Yet, Jonathan’s thunderous silence offers us no answers. “We are on our own!”

  

We have never experienced a situation whereby there was a vacuum in governance simply because the incumbent’s tenure was winding down. Jonathan was simply not interested in being president until the expiration of his term on the morning of May 29. He had been on hibernation and plunged the nation into further degeneration either as a punishment for not returning him or as the height of the incompetence and impunity that marked his six-year reign. It is almost as if all the ills that have been perpetrated, all the issues that have been neglected, all the corners that have been cut, are eventually now coming to the fore and there are too many holes to stop the many leaks. What happened under Jonathan’s watch should be treated as a warning to the incoming government as to how vulnerable we are as a nation. Until we take what belongs to us from a few powerful overlords.

For fear of sounding like a broken record, I will repeat again what the subsidy means to me. Importing finished petroleum product is akin to having a natural mango orchard and what we do is only harvest the fruit. Without adding any value, we export the natural God-given bounty where foreigners process it. They squeeze and package it and import it back here to Nigeria as a finished product. Packaged mango juice! This process is what is now supposedly too expensive for we the nationals to consume, so the government pays the importer a further fee, so that we can afford it! This has to be more than ridiculous! We give all the refining capacity to foreign states creating employment and profit for them, whilst we deal with pipeline vandalism, armed militancy, a lack of education and development and erratic supply here. We also create the oligarchs who strangle the lifeblood of the nation.

Our lives revolve around petroleum. Provision of water, electricity and other social services simply diminish drastically due to the unavailability of oil. The importation of generators is licensed to a monopoly. And, evidently, it is the same cabal who has made sure that despite spending $35b on improving our power generation has ensured that we are down to less than 2500mw in the whole country. At the peak of the shortage last week, Kano got 2mw of electricity from the national grid. This is less than what powers one celebrity’s house in Beverly Hills! What is the knock-on effect? Everything shuts down, we suffer then people like Mr. Uba of the Capital Oil fame can become our local champion and decide to have pity on us as we scramble to buy what charity he magnanimously decides to allow us?

Our vulnerability as a nation is rooted in the impunity going on in this sector. We cannot create jobs, alleviate poverty, generate electricity or boost the economy without attending to the challenges at the NNPC Towers. Creating an enabling environment for the welfare and security of Nigerians depends strongly on committing to genuinely reforming the energy sector.

 Welcome President Buhari, we await these sweeping changes and pray for God’s guidance.