October 21, 2021. The Nigerian Guild of Editors had gathered at the auditorium of the Nigerian Air Force Conference Centre in Abuja for its annual caucus. Ray Ekpu, the renowned journalist and newspaper editor, was chairing the prime session of the opening day of the two-day event.

Ekpu took opportunity of his opening remarks to enrol himself, as it were, in the overflowing informal national association of disenchanted citizens, derisively dubbed the “Wailers” by Femi Adesina, President Muhammadu Buhari’s Senior Special Assistant. These are citizens who regularly bemoan their fate and that of the country at the government’s inability to meet the basic expectations of governance. Membership of the group had already grown exponentially by the time Ekpu publicly joined at the editors’ conference, but he joined all the same.

Ekpu’s lamentations, delivered in his opening remarks, referenced various sectors of the society where things are simply not working, from education and security, to the media and petroleum industries. He simply could not understand how the government could allow such a degeneration of life and living in the country. About the petroleum industry, in particular, the co-founder of Newswatch magazine pointedly remarked that “we should be ashamed of ourselves,” as an oil producing country we cannot fix our refineries, rather we are importing oil to meet local consumption needs. Speaking in characteristic measured baritone, Ekpu released not a minor body hit to the government, leaving his audience sobered by the weight of his remarks and shaking their head at the catalogue of problems his speech highlighted.

Mele Kyari, managing director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation/ Company (NNPC), who spoke next, as guest speaker, had a different perspective of the situation, obviously.

When he took the podium to speak, Kyari wasted no time to respond to Ekpu’s sobering punches. Kyari had a reposte to one of Ekpu’s line shots: “No, we should not be ashamed of ourselves,” a response  to Ekpu’s indicting comment that we, or, rather, the government, should be for failing to fix the refineries and resorting to importation of oil.

The NNPC helmsman’s rendition of the situation was a mix of the trite and some promises. He first played the mundane card of blaming past governments, contending, as Nigerians have become used to hearing, that it was the failure of past governments to do the right thing that brought the country to its current pass. Government officials who take to that line easily forget so often that the extant regime has been on seat for all of seven years, a period long enough to conceive, bear a child and have him well into primary school.

Much more importantly though, Kyari offered an impressive outline of what he said was being done to rehabilitate the refinaries. The due process mechanism for selecting the right companies to undertake the job of rehabilitating the refineries was quite arduous, he said, but assured his audience that the work was almost through and that it was a matter of time before the refineries would swing back to life and there would then be no basis anymore for anyone to contend that we should be ashamed of ourselves. That was in October 2021.

At about the time Kyari spoke and assured the audience that the process of selecting the appropriate firms to fix the refineries was at advanced level, the issue of subsidy on petroleum consumption in Nigeria and the necessity to remove it had rebounded to the public discussion menu. Government officials had resumed the periodic rattling pitch for the propriety of removing the so-called oil subsidy. As it seems, the bugaboo will never go away.

Related News

Of course, the threat to remove the petroleum subsidy, whatever it consists of, is one that the organized labour and even the unorganized ordinary folks never take lightly. And so mobilization started towards the end of the year for a showdown, should the subsidy be removed.

Till now, interestingly, what the petroleum ssubsidy actually consists of, how much it really comes to, and indeed who is actually subsidizing what remain contentious issues. As it seems, where a Nigerian stands on the subsidy matter is largely determined by where he is sitting in the socio-economic scheme of things. What you have here seems to be a classical exposition to the thesis of dialectical materialism. In the Nigerian case here, the patriots of today who are mostly those in government and around the corridors of power easily see the reason for the subsidy to be removed. As they always argue, and forcefully too, there is so much that can be derived from the removal of the subsidy that, once it is done, all the roads, the hospitals and the schools will be fixed and the society will be better for it.

Interestingly, in Nigeria, the patriots of today have a way of becoming the wailers of tomorrow. And vice versa. Take President Muhammadu Buhari, for instance. His view, openly declared in a characteristic definite stance, some years back, was that the so-called petroleum subsidy was a ruse, there was nothing like petroleum subsidy in Nigeria. What the government in office then was calling subsidy, according to Buhari, was a fraud and a subterfuge for misappropriation public fund by officials of the state. But that was then, and Buhari was a wailer. To be fair to the President, he still has not told anyone that there is subsidy on petroleum products. It is his government officials that have been carrying out the campaign. It is left for students of government to establish what the difference is between a President and his government.

And to imagine now that the petroleum subsidy does not only exist but is growing beyond bounds. Now, some folks are almost on the verge of suggesting that Nigeria should be sold so that the proceeds can be used to pay for petroleum subsidy. Where do we go from here?

The Federal Government, having been persuaded both by political consideration and the apparent determination of organized labour to resist any attempt to topple the status quo, has decided to hand over the petroleum subsidy headache to the next administration. There is, therefore, no last word yet on the matter. In the meantime, what happened? NNPC, Kyari’s NNPC, says it wants all of N3 trillion per annum to sustain the subsidy. Kyari, the same one who told Ekpu and editors that there was no basis to be ashamed of the situation and that the refinaries were on their way back to life, that everything would be all right in terms of supply of petroleum products. And he spoke so eloquently.

Is the process of fixing the refineries that Kyari said was on process still going on? If it is, and it will solve Nigeria’s petroleum supply problems sooner than later as he promised, does that mean that the N3 trillion his NNPC is asking for to sustain the subsidy is for a short while? How short a while?

What makes NNPC’s latest stance on the petroleum subsidy shockingly unrealistic, if not reprehensible, is that till date the true petroleum consumption profile of Nigeria remains unsettled. Recent figures from the State Petroleum Company of the consumption level of oil by Nigeria appear very outlandish. The graph and comparative analysis of what is with what was, not too long ago do not show a realistic gradient.

It is understandable, therefore, that the National Assembly was so shocked at the figure NNPC threw up as what it would require to maintain subsidy that the legislators now want to audit how much oil Nigeria is consuming daily. Can you beat that? The NNPC shocked even the National Assembly!