It has been institutionalised. It’s now part and parcel of our wages. And it comes with great agony every month. Just like our monthly salary.
We panic as each month rolls to a close. We receive monthly pains. Courtesy of the almighty Nigerian National National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC). There’s no intention to end our monthly misery any time soon.
Sadly enough, government stands with arms akimbo, watching from afar. It keeps behaving as if it knows nothing. It is a grand plan against us. They are acquiescent.
We are wickedly left to our plights and misfortunes. We are at the mercy of the octopus NNPC. It takes delight in increasing our pains. It revels in hurting our collective feelings.
The corporation wants to make crude oil out of us. It takes absolute pleasure in drilling us every month. As soon as it reads correctly that our salary is on the way. It swiftly swings into diabolical action. And does it with the speed of light.
It has become NNPC’s monthly ritual. With uncanny dexterity, it effortlessly rolls out make-believe figures. Very frightening. It insists they are raw facts, to snuff life out of us. And it does it as if addicted to making us suffer.
So, the NNPC was in its usual element exactly a week ago. It took its group managing director, Mele Kyari, to do the damage that Thursday. And the hurt inflicted on us was huge.
He was confidently armed “to the teeth.” He came with the known template. We were not expecting any good news from him. But we never knew it would be that callous and heavy. He was quite unmindful of our existence.
He spoke in the manner he did because of his firm belief, the rich can’t and must not be made to cry. Only the poor, the downtrodden, do. Just imagine the outright arrogance in his queer delivery:
“We are importing (petrol) at market price and we are selling at N162 per litre. Looking at the actual market price, the actual price could have been anywhere between N211 and N234 to the litre.”
What message is he struggling to send across? He is not ashamed to voice it out coarsely:
“The meaning of this is that consumers are not paying for the full value of the PMS we are consuming. The difference is being carried on the books of the NNPC.”
And so? What does it matter? We cannot be convinced. We see scam, rot in this wobbling narrative.
Then, what we have been waiting for: “I can confirm to you that the NNPC may no longer be in the position to carry the burden.”
See a confused mind at work: “I will not say we are in subsidy regime.”
What regime are we in then? His queer, nauseating response: “We are in a situation where we are trying to exit this under-priced sale of PMS, until we come to terms of the full value of the product in the market.”
Kyari is not anywhere done: “PMS sells across our borders anywhere around N300 to the litre and in some places up to N500 to N550 to the litre.”
That is the crux of the matter. And that is a major cause of our woes and predicament. Kyari has just exposed his likes. It is one great revelation from the horse’s mouth. He blatantly admitted failure and incompetence.
We have many different government agencies manning our borders. Instead of selfless service to the nation, they render selfish service to themselves and their pockets. They are laws unto themselves. They would leave the borders practically unmanned. They would pursue people on the streets in search of invisible contraband. They know where to get them, but they dare not venture to go near there.
That is why Kyari was bold enough to pass the buck on us. He blamed us for not patrolling the borders, looking for smuggled petrol. For his quack reasoning and reason, we must pay N234 per litre of fuel.
Until we do that, his NNPC would never have mercy on us. It would continue to visit us with agony and pain. And this will come as we get or prepare to get our monthly wages.
This malady reared its head some months ago. NNPC first hid under the “fluctuating” world oil prices. It promised to respond strictly to the world’s supply and demand.
But some Shylock independent oil marketers never bought into this. On one or two rear occasions, we were to “enjoy” this “accidental crash.” These Shylocks never obliged us. They refused to crash their price. Theirs is win-win.
Now, the NNPC has fully returned to its stinking vomit: Subsidy. With maximum effects. And government is giving it tactical and “technical” backing. The reason the corporation would not stop biting us.
It’s amazing and amusing how times change. These characters in government once raised the greatest campaign against subsidy. That was when they were in the opposition. They were in dire need of maximum power then.
They made mess of the previous regime’s policy on subsidy. They openly called them thieves. They faulted it and christened subsidy a huge scam.
But times have changed. These fair-weather species have changed also. In fact, their CHANGE has changed radically too. It is change anyhow, somehow. They keep on changing the goal post at the slightest opportunity.
Our simple and sincere interpretation: 2023 is it! This is not far-fetched. It is one easy way they garner and gather greedily. And with extreme fierceness. All for the 2023 general election.
Various dimensional challenges threatening our existence are not to be given priority attention. They are being carelessly relegated. As if they do not exist anymore.
They sweep them under the carpet daily. They want to confine them to the dirty dustbin of our ugly history.
None of them wants those challenges addressed honestly. They have turned them into a cash cow; making them a lucrative sub-sector of our wobbling and weird economy.
They feel comfortably at home. That we continue to pay through our noses for fake fuel subsidy. The more reason Kyari found it extremely difficult to call it subsidy.
Guilty conscience would not spare him. He could not find an appropriate word. He tried hard. He could not. No word came to him to explain away the malaise.
The evils that men do, and women too, not only live after them but they are equally with them, even now. They haunt and hurt them daily.
So be it with NNPC and its league of cohorts. And we won’t beg them. Let them go to blazes with their subsidy.
They should say that to the marines. We careless. We refuse to be made miserable.