How to stop crude oil theft
The Habergeon Column
How to stop crude oil theft
By Jacob Aguomba
www.petroleumnewsngr.com
Petroleum products, particularly premium motor spirit, better known as petrol, its price regime and its man-made scarcity has been a source of rancor in the last three weeks. And “my fellow countrymen {and women}” have had to pay for petrol through their nose to power their generators which they need to pump water from their boreholes. They are bearing the loads which our epileptic power sector and archived public waterworks were initially meant to relieve. Those who could afford to buy food also had to pay for cooking gas while the rural dwellers endured more hot sweat to pay for kerosene. The Nigeria National Petroleum Company {NNPC} shook the bee heist when it started juggling the price of petrol which it bought from Dangote Refineries. The horse trading and counter accusations of manipulations became national embarrassment. The rumpus came to a head-on collision when even our own quite Aliko Dangote tried to pacify an agitated countrymen by insisting that the fuel his refinery sold to NNPC WAS 15% cheaper compared to what importers sold to us. He soon turned another dark side of the coin when he tried to score a point by telling Nigerians that petrol sold 44% higher in Saudi Arabia. Apparently disgusted by that comparison, Dr Sam Amadi asked that Dangote should first tell Nigerians the average income of Saudi families and how it weighed with that of Nigerians. It soon became clear that it was time for the fuel subsidy removal would force some unstable heads to roll in the ministries and the NNPC and her regulatory subsidiaries. This is a season of Anomy! What we have is not exactly a banana republic , even as we walk on slippery banana peels. We have a country and we have been here long before independence from British colonial rule; we had existed as different nation states known today as ethnic nationalities and that diversify is our strength in unity. We have had several attempts at enacting a set of rules or constitution that should guide us to prosper as one consolidated federation and provide good governance to our teeming populace. But that has been our undoing and the reason is not far- fetched: We have refused to adopt the lesson in the age old aphorism which teaches that you can force a horse to the water but cannot force the animal to drink.
Many of those who claim to love Nigeria have failed her at her time of need. Time and again, they have proved to be interested in exercising political power over this humongous expanse of land, exploit her gullible citizens, cut their own share of the cake and dump her, sometimes into a quagmire, sometimes unto a season of anomy as late Bola Ige did describe a nation at the crossroads in which khaki clad politicians raped and plundered the nation under the nozzle of their guns. He observed, not without numbing lamentations that these powerful men found their comfort on one side of the ethnic divide while men in Danshiki, twisted beard and gray hair posed, reaped and hedged the scam on the opposite side of political squabbles. Forty years later, is history repeating itself from a different angle of the conundrum? To be sure, we now have an elected government and more than 50% of our over 2oo million population are vibrant youths. A large number of our adults are seasoned professionals, gifted and knowledgeable elders whose works has been applauded by those who should know; at home and globally, Nigerians have made their mark and written their names in letters of gold in about every imaginable trade or human endeavor, competing and excelling with and among the best in the world.
But the surprise of the century is that everybody, believers, atheists and visionaries have inundated us with preachments on Nigeria’s rich potentials. We have been told that our bulging youth population is one potential source of greatness. A large population in other climes is tantamount to a large market and by extension a large economy. Our blessed nation is destined to be great! A diverse mineral resource has also been touted as another pillar of our expected rapid development. However, what nobody has been able to convince me about is how a jobless population can be a catalyst to economic advancement. A jobless university graduate has no tangible contribution in growing the economy as he can neither pay tax nor participate in any productive endeavor commensurate to his or her training. Gold and other natural resources are perhaps purposely left in the hands of illegal miners across the lower Sahel region of Nigeria. The army, air force and the naval personnel have a combined taskforce charged with fighting crude oil theft in the Niger Delta. But that has over the years proved a failed policy. There have been allegations of the celebrant licking the bottom port when her guests are gone which translates to the supposed security men conniving with the youthful owners of the illegal refineries to catch their own pieces of the cake. And I beg to submit that we change our approach to the menace of crude oil theft and the corresponding illegal refineries. The present scenario is that our security personnel have become our problem. So instead of shooting those who operate unauthorized refineries, we could organize them into cooperatives, encourage them to pull their resources together, do micro refineries and thereby find self employment or mass engagement and become useful to themselves and the larger society. Perhaps, we could end this season of anomy on a happy note.
