| Professor Tam David-West |
There is no oil subsidy in Nigeria. It is a lie and fraud. After the regime of General Buhari, I challenged government after government, from General Ibrahim Babangida and Chief Ernest Shonekan to General Olusegun Obasanjo and President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, to appear on national television with me to justify their subsidy.
Let me introduce you to the basics. Let us say a particular commodity like gari is sold for N10 per bag hypothetically and the farmers are producing to make us self-sufficient at N10. But at a time, they can’t produce enough because of either bad harvest or natural causes, the government now says since garri is a staple food, the government goes to another country where gari is produced and buys it at N20 per bag and brings it to Nigeria to sell at N10 per bag. The government now writes off the extra N10 –– that is subsidy. The extra N10 the government pays on behalf of the people for them to still buy at N10 is the subsidy paid on that commodity. No government should exist if it can’t serve the people because government is a trust.
They are trustees for the people. Edmund Burke, the great British philosopher, said that government is a contrivance of human wisdom and the wisdom should be used to satisfy people’s needs. Any government that can’t satisfy the need of its people is irrelevant and must be overthrown and kicked out. Coming to petroleum, there is no oil subsidy. Oil subsidy in Nigeria is fiction, it doesn’t exist and it is a fraud. During Buhari’s time, we had three refineries. When necessary, I mean, whenever there was shortage of oil, we embarked on offshore processing. If at a time, the production of oil couldn’t satisfy our needs, we selected oil companies like Shell and others that we would give crude oil to refine abroad, sell at foreign exchange and pay to our account.
We got quantum of barrels of crude oil and gave to these companies and after they might have refined it, let’s say they got one million litres and we needed only 200 litres, they would give us the quantity we wanted and sell the remaining and give us foreign exchange. We only took our fuel back, never imported fuel. This time what do they do? These fraudulent people will take our oil, refine it and bring it back and sell it at foreign exchange.
This is fraud in the highest places. Why is it that during Buhari era, with three refineries we were self sufficient but at their time, with four refineries we are now importing fuel? I personally signed the contract of the fourth refinery which we call new Port Harcourt Refinery in 1984. It was one of the best in Africa, with a capacity of 160,000 barrels per day. The first refinery, in Port Harcourt, was built in 1965; Warri refinery in 1978, and Kaduna refinery in 1980. A newly constructed refinery can’t have major problem for about 30 years.
The problem they will not tell you is that after Buhari, every Minister and Head of State became an oil sheikh, except General Abdulsalami Abubakar. Some ministers have petrol stations and oil blocs. You can’t serve the nation and serve yourself at the same time because you can’t serve two masters at a time. One must serve his country and the dividends of doing this is satisfaction. Total capacity of our four refineries is 445,000 barrels per day. If the refineries are working even at 80 per cent, we will have more than enough product.
They did not do that but sabotaged our refineries. I have been shouting since 1995 and I wrote that they are killing Nigeria and poor men. And in 2009, the House of Representatives corroborated me by saying that refineries were sabotaged. Abdulsalami as head of state, reacting to the state of our refineries, said he didn’t want to open a box of scandal. Why did they do this to the common man?
Who are the
importers?
Big people! A senator said this year, Nigeria spends N860
million on fuel importation and they projected that by the end of the
year, over N1 trillion will be spent on importation of fuel when our
budget is N4.3 trillion. Insanity! Dan Etete said they needed $250
million to repair the refineries but the same minister said Nigeria is
importing fuel at $900 million.
Is that not insanity?
If you need this
huge amount of money to repair refineries, why don’t you build new
refineries? The money you are using to import, use it to build
refineries. Why do you think Obasanjo did not repair the four refineries
we had and build four extra for petroleum to sold at N20 as he analysed
when he was in power? Olusegun Obasanjo is a great liar. They will not
do so in order to continue to import fuel for sell
