 |
I am one of those who feel that Nigerians, as a matter of their God-given right, do not even need to pay for fuel. And my reason is simple: I don’t charge my children (not even a subsidised rate) for the food they eat in my house.
So, it is bad enough that we are even paying anything at all for fuel. But for our government to now say there is no going back on its resolve to make us to pay for fuel as if we do not have a drop of it in the whole of this country is the height of irresponsibility.
However, given that we have since come to accept irresponsibility as one of the cardinal responsibilities of government in this clime, we might as well swallow this latest bitter pill, even though we know it would not be the last.
But before we step into this new regime of no-subsidy regime, could this Goodluck Jonathan government that regularly flaunts an anti-graft stance before everyone who cares to look, kindly tell us how many people have gone to jail or been relieved of their jobs for mismanaging the subsidy arrangement so much that we now have no option than to throw the baby away with the bath water?
Of course, I am not expecting an answer. For, I think, the answer lies in what I have been hearing from the National Assembly since the lawmakers began their inquest into the subsidy swindles.
For instance, whoever watched the Group Managing Director of the NNPC, Mr. John Oniwon, at the Senate hearing into the mismanagement of the subsidy regime on Monday would have come out even more convinced that subsidy should not be removed. The reason: I cannot remember any single question that the NNPC boss answered convincingly and satisfactorily. Yes, I did not expect that he would know everything about the running of NNPC and its businesses (it actually wouldn’t hurt, if he did), but did he have to look over to his army of staff and consultants for answers on just every issue?
And from the little he managed to answer well, we could instantly deduce that even the local refining we all thought was going on was actually a ruse. NNPC simply took crude oil and shipped to either UK or Cote d’Ivoire for refining. So, why did they continue to take the allocation if they could not refine it? How much was being taken? How much was being realised? What did it cost to refine? What percentage of the crude allocated to NNPC to refine was refined locally and how much of it was refined abroad? No clear answer.
The oilmen fell back on their old trick of hiding behind figures and statistics and pie charts and histograms and bar charts (which they themselves do not even understand) to bamboozle us. That is what they have been doing over the years. Each time we call for an inquest into how our money is being stolen at NNPC, they come up with new charts. They would confuse us so much that we’d be the ones, pleading with them to stop explaining. And in order not to be seen as too illiterate to understand simple (?) graphs, we’d tell them to take a bow and leave. Then, they would go back to unleash even more wicked looting.
But thanks to the presence of mind in the current Senate – thanks to the likes of Bukola Saraki, Magnus Abe and, of course, David Mark, the lawmakers are insisting on getting the right answers – in simple English (not in some pedantic graph). Suddenly, the smokescreen has vanished and the total absence of substance in both the NNPC and those who run it has come to shocking relief.
In all of this, the only thing that comes out very clearly is corruption. Yes, for several years, we have all been taken for a ride – all in the name of subsidising our locally consumed fuel. But, on the contrary, we were actually paying more for fuel than we would have paid if we just liberalised the import and sale of petrol like we do with stock fish, used cars, fruit juice, red wine, electronics, electrical fittings, second-hand clothes, toothpick and just about everything that we import into the country. That explains why, despite our subsidy, we still pay the highest for locally consumed petroleum products when compared with other oil-producing countries.
That also explains why we must stand economics on its head by insisting on subsidising consumption instead of production. That is why we put every imaginable obstacle before anyone, who wants to set up a refinery in Nigeria, even as we continue to pay some people to ensure that none of our already built refineries ever works.
This idea of giving a few fat cats a blank cheque to import finished petroleum products remains the single most crippling drawback to our dream of industrialisation.
Put in layman’s language, it means that we pay them in advance, the goods are never delivered and then we pay them the balance – sometimes with mind-boggling upward variations. The result is that we continue to be indebted to people, who should be in jail for swindling the country through corporate 419. People who, ideally, should be the ones refunding money to the country (well into their fourth and fifth generations) are the ones who now end up holding our president, the ruling party, and by extension, the country, to ransom – simply because they donated eight-digit sums to the PDP campaign.
When they promise to ensure that there is no fuel scarcity during Christmas, Sallah, electioneering campaigns or any such major national event, we clap for them, give them tax holiday (for uncommon kindness and corporate social responsibility). Sometimes, we even add one or two national honours to their already over-decorated hats, when we should actually be stoning them.
It’s all so confusing. And that is how it has been since this issue of removal of fuel subsidy assumed a frenzied proportion. Yes, for nearly four months now, we have been trying to get to the root of why fuel subsidy never seems to work in Nigeria and for nearly four months, we have been dancing in circles. The only certain thing is that the Jonathan-led Federal Government has concluded plans to remove subsidy with effect from the next fiscal year. Whether that is the right thing to do at this point in time, whether the proposal was well thought out ab initio, has been left to conjecture. Nobody is telling us anything else. Organised labour has made its customary we-no-go-gree noise – and would probably make more as soon as the subsidy removal is officially announced.
Nobody is explaining anything to anybody. The spin-doctors in the Presidency probably think that it’s a done deal. That after Labour protests for two or three days, it would tire out and begin to adjust to the new regime.
For now, the strongest opposition appears to be coming from the National Assembly. But even at that, one is still not too comfortable. For unless the lawmakers have become born again, the Presidency would bid its time, look for the right moment and move in with Ghana Must Go, use it to break up the present unity of purpose therein and the rest is history. It would then go into a waiting game with the labour unions, give them a day or two, or even three to protest, and then, it’s all over.
I suspect that this is the model government thinkers have sold to the Presidency – which probably explains why official communication on what to do with the money that would be saved from the removal of subsidy has been scanty. They already have their work cut out. But I must advise against complacency. Let’s not take things for granted. Even if we agree that there is nothing we can do for now to stop a government that is bent on removing subsidy, the government could, at least, humour us a bit by giving us a detailed breakdown of what it intends to do with the extra money – possibly with timelines and target. This idea of saying we will do roads, do power, hospital, etc. is already a tired line.
Is it not shocking that it is the most democratic government we have had in recent years that is the most unwilling to go into dialogue? Even IBB and Abacha allowed us to discuss IMF loan and fuel price increase respectively. Why are the people around the Presidency so averse to debate on this subsidy thing? Why must it be faceless organisations taking out paid advert spaces to communicate what government intends to do? Why is no top government functionary bold enough to sign the advertorial, so that we can hold him/her to the promise?
Incidentally, it has been the president himself, who has used the opportunity of every public and private forum to explain the need to remove subsidy.
But I am sure that Jonathan did not arrive on the decision to remove subsidy on his own. If we remove Finance Minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who is undeniably his partner in this, where are the other proponents of this subsidy removal thing? Why are they not speaking up in its defence? Why is everyone just waiting for January, or whenever the removal is billed to take off?
Understandably, the list of beneficiaries of the Federal Government’s infamous fuel subsidy released penultimate weekend by the Senate is a huge eye-opener. Of course, I must confess, I had seen the list – though not as detailed – long before the Senator Magnus Abe committee made it public. That was about two weeks earlier when, Tutu, one of my senior hands in Abuja, first scooped on the list.
I had taken one long look at it and noted that virtually everybody who was anybody in the country’s oil sector was involved. If this was the cartel, then it goes to confirm the belief we have always had in the media that one gang or the other is always running this country at every given time. We may go to the polls from time to time, pretending to be taking our destiny into our own hands by voting in those who would govern us but governing and ruling appear to be poles apart. While those we elected govern, the unelected godfathers rule both we the electors and the elected from behind the scene, determining the direction our yoyo government swings (and with it, the rest of the country). And this has been the situation since independence. What actually changes from time to time is the terminology by which we call it. During Yar’Adua’s time we called it ‘cabal’. Further down the line, we called them Kaduna Mafia. In between, we even had a brief interregnum of Langtang Mafia. They ran the government and controlled all the businesses that spurn off therefrom. Today, the new (but not so new) terminology is ‘cartel’.
Today the ‘cartel’ is bursting at its seams with some of the biggest financiers of both the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and all its campaign efforts. Many of those on the list are still the same people Jonathan would call to Abuja, as key members of the organised private sector (OPS), to discuss the modalities for removing fuel subsidy. Who is fooling who? On that list are also the same people whom the president often puts on his entourage during his trips outside the country, showcasing them to the international business community as members of an omnibus economic team.
Every time we accuse former president Olusegun Obasanjo of cheaply and illegally selling off our national patrimony to his friends and cronies and fronts, it turns out that it is also to these same persons that the patrimonies were sold to.
Surely, we are in a mess. Our traditional wisdom advises that we entrust the safety of our property to those more likely to steal it if left unguarded and that it takes a thief to catch another thief. But can that same thief catch himself? That is where the problem lies.
My only grouse is that there are now carpenters, mechanics, medicine dealers and all manner of petty foodstuff traders all plugging into the subsidy racket and ripping off the country. But that is not even my anger: how come I don’t know anybody who knows anybody, so that I too could make the list of benefiting cartel. For sure, it is now a status symbol.
But to further rub in this subsidy insult on all of us, the members of the cartel, who we named but could not shame, are the same ones who still strut the landscape as though they are some genuine business whiz kids. But they are no whiz kids; they are just smart Alecs who know one person who knows another person in government. They link up, and the rip-off begins. Having gone to Harvard, London, New York, Lagos and all those status-conferring elite business schools (the same school where Gadhafi’s son went and paid a little over a million pounds and was awarded a PhD without reading any book), those of us who attended or local state universities begin to feel so hugely inferior to them and grovel and lap up everything they tell us to be the only acceptable standard.
They dazzle us even more with all their power-point presentations, their impressive portfolios of degrees and all that. The result? For doing a job that hardly comes up to a quarter of what the civil servant does (for which we have refused to pay N18, 000), we foolish hand in seven-figure salaries to the neo-conmen. Yes, even our government officials, elected and appointed, also ‘fall mugu’. They engage the ‘whiz kids’ as consultants to drive government and its policies.
We soon forget that none of the men and women, in the course of history (both ancient and modern), who are on record to have developed any country ever went to those fancy schools. In fact, it was only after such men and women had completed their tenures, and had succeeded in turning their countries around, that they now sat back and put their experiences down in writing for posterity. It is those books that our new whiz kids now go and read, distort a few lines therein, use it to mask their selfish and evil interests, and begin to dazzle the rest of us. And before we know it, we abandon the commanding heights of our economy to them.
So, it is bad enough that we are even paying anything at all for fuel. But for our government to now say there is no going back on its resolve to make us to pay for fuel as if we do not have a drop of it in the whole of this country is the height of irresponsibility.
However, given that we have since come to accept irresponsibility as one of the cardinal responsibilities of government in this clime, we might as well swallow this latest bitter pill, even though we know it would not be the last.
But before we step into this new regime of no-subsidy regime, could this Goodluck Jonathan government that regularly flaunts an anti-graft stance before everyone who cares to look, kindly tell us how many people have gone to jail or been relieved of their jobs for mismanaging the subsidy arrangement so much that we now have no option than to throw the baby away with the bath water?
Of course, I am not expecting an answer. For, I think, the answer lies in what I have been hearing from the National Assembly since the lawmakers began their inquest into the subsidy swindles.
For instance, whoever watched the Group Managing Director of the NNPC, Mr. John Oniwon, at the Senate hearing into the mismanagement of the subsidy regime on Monday would have come out even more convinced that subsidy should not be removed. The reason: I cannot remember any single question that the NNPC boss answered convincingly and satisfactorily. Yes, I did not expect that he would know everything about the running of NNPC and its businesses (it actually wouldn’t hurt, if he did), but did he have to look over to his army of staff and consultants for answers on just every issue?
And from the little he managed to answer well, we could instantly deduce that even the local refining we all thought was going on was actually a ruse. NNPC simply took crude oil and shipped to either UK or Cote d’Ivoire for refining. So, why did they continue to take the allocation if they could not refine it? How much was being taken? How much was being realised? What did it cost to refine? What percentage of the crude allocated to NNPC to refine was refined locally and how much of it was refined abroad? No clear answer.
The oilmen fell back on their old trick of hiding behind figures and statistics and pie charts and histograms and bar charts (which they themselves do not even understand) to bamboozle us. That is what they have been doing over the years. Each time we call for an inquest into how our money is being stolen at NNPC, they come up with new charts. They would confuse us so much that we’d be the ones, pleading with them to stop explaining. And in order not to be seen as too illiterate to understand simple (?) graphs, we’d tell them to take a bow and leave. Then, they would go back to unleash even more wicked looting.
But thanks to the presence of mind in the current Senate – thanks to the likes of Bukola Saraki, Magnus Abe and, of course, David Mark, the lawmakers are insisting on getting the right answers – in simple English (not in some pedantic graph). Suddenly, the smokescreen has vanished and the total absence of substance in both the NNPC and those who run it has come to shocking relief.
In all of this, the only thing that comes out very clearly is corruption. Yes, for several years, we have all been taken for a ride – all in the name of subsidising our locally consumed fuel. But, on the contrary, we were actually paying more for fuel than we would have paid if we just liberalised the import and sale of petrol like we do with stock fish, used cars, fruit juice, red wine, electronics, electrical fittings, second-hand clothes, toothpick and just about everything that we import into the country. That explains why, despite our subsidy, we still pay the highest for locally consumed petroleum products when compared with other oil-producing countries.
That also explains why we must stand economics on its head by insisting on subsidising consumption instead of production. That is why we put every imaginable obstacle before anyone, who wants to set up a refinery in Nigeria, even as we continue to pay some people to ensure that none of our already built refineries ever works.
This idea of giving a few fat cats a blank cheque to import finished petroleum products remains the single most crippling drawback to our dream of industrialisation.
Put in layman’s language, it means that we pay them in advance, the goods are never delivered and then we pay them the balance – sometimes with mind-boggling upward variations. The result is that we continue to be indebted to people, who should be in jail for swindling the country through corporate 419. People who, ideally, should be the ones refunding money to the country (well into their fourth and fifth generations) are the ones who now end up holding our president, the ruling party, and by extension, the country, to ransom – simply because they donated eight-digit sums to the PDP campaign.
When they promise to ensure that there is no fuel scarcity during Christmas, Sallah, electioneering campaigns or any such major national event, we clap for them, give them tax holiday (for uncommon kindness and corporate social responsibility). Sometimes, we even add one or two national honours to their already over-decorated hats, when we should actually be stoning them.
It’s all so confusing. And that is how it has been since this issue of removal of fuel subsidy assumed a frenzied proportion. Yes, for nearly four months now, we have been trying to get to the root of why fuel subsidy never seems to work in Nigeria and for nearly four months, we have been dancing in circles. The only certain thing is that the Jonathan-led Federal Government has concluded plans to remove subsidy with effect from the next fiscal year. Whether that is the right thing to do at this point in time, whether the proposal was well thought out ab initio, has been left to conjecture. Nobody is telling us anything else. Organised labour has made its customary we-no-go-gree noise – and would probably make more as soon as the subsidy removal is officially announced.
Nobody is explaining anything to anybody. The spin-doctors in the Presidency probably think that it’s a done deal. That after Labour protests for two or three days, it would tire out and begin to adjust to the new regime.
For now, the strongest opposition appears to be coming from the National Assembly. But even at that, one is still not too comfortable. For unless the lawmakers have become born again, the Presidency would bid its time, look for the right moment and move in with Ghana Must Go, use it to break up the present unity of purpose therein and the rest is history. It would then go into a waiting game with the labour unions, give them a day or two, or even three to protest, and then, it’s all over.
I suspect that this is the model government thinkers have sold to the Presidency – which probably explains why official communication on what to do with the money that would be saved from the removal of subsidy has been scanty. They already have their work cut out. But I must advise against complacency. Let’s not take things for granted. Even if we agree that there is nothing we can do for now to stop a government that is bent on removing subsidy, the government could, at least, humour us a bit by giving us a detailed breakdown of what it intends to do with the extra money – possibly with timelines and target. This idea of saying we will do roads, do power, hospital, etc. is already a tired line.
Is it not shocking that it is the most democratic government we have had in recent years that is the most unwilling to go into dialogue? Even IBB and Abacha allowed us to discuss IMF loan and fuel price increase respectively. Why are the people around the Presidency so averse to debate on this subsidy thing? Why must it be faceless organisations taking out paid advert spaces to communicate what government intends to do? Why is no top government functionary bold enough to sign the advertorial, so that we can hold him/her to the promise?
Incidentally, it has been the president himself, who has used the opportunity of every public and private forum to explain the need to remove subsidy.
But I am sure that Jonathan did not arrive on the decision to remove subsidy on his own. If we remove Finance Minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who is undeniably his partner in this, where are the other proponents of this subsidy removal thing? Why are they not speaking up in its defence? Why is everyone just waiting for January, or whenever the removal is billed to take off?
Understandably, the list of beneficiaries of the Federal Government’s infamous fuel subsidy released penultimate weekend by the Senate is a huge eye-opener. Of course, I must confess, I had seen the list – though not as detailed – long before the Senator Magnus Abe committee made it public. That was about two weeks earlier when, Tutu, one of my senior hands in Abuja, first scooped on the list.
I had taken one long look at it and noted that virtually everybody who was anybody in the country’s oil sector was involved. If this was the cartel, then it goes to confirm the belief we have always had in the media that one gang or the other is always running this country at every given time. We may go to the polls from time to time, pretending to be taking our destiny into our own hands by voting in those who would govern us but governing and ruling appear to be poles apart. While those we elected govern, the unelected godfathers rule both we the electors and the elected from behind the scene, determining the direction our yoyo government swings (and with it, the rest of the country). And this has been the situation since independence. What actually changes from time to time is the terminology by which we call it. During Yar’Adua’s time we called it ‘cabal’. Further down the line, we called them Kaduna Mafia. In between, we even had a brief interregnum of Langtang Mafia. They ran the government and controlled all the businesses that spurn off therefrom. Today, the new (but not so new) terminology is ‘cartel’.
Today the ‘cartel’ is bursting at its seams with some of the biggest financiers of both the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and all its campaign efforts. Many of those on the list are still the same people Jonathan would call to Abuja, as key members of the organised private sector (OPS), to discuss the modalities for removing fuel subsidy. Who is fooling who? On that list are also the same people whom the president often puts on his entourage during his trips outside the country, showcasing them to the international business community as members of an omnibus economic team.
Every time we accuse former president Olusegun Obasanjo of cheaply and illegally selling off our national patrimony to his friends and cronies and fronts, it turns out that it is also to these same persons that the patrimonies were sold to.
Surely, we are in a mess. Our traditional wisdom advises that we entrust the safety of our property to those more likely to steal it if left unguarded and that it takes a thief to catch another thief. But can that same thief catch himself? That is where the problem lies.
My only grouse is that there are now carpenters, mechanics, medicine dealers and all manner of petty foodstuff traders all plugging into the subsidy racket and ripping off the country. But that is not even my anger: how come I don’t know anybody who knows anybody, so that I too could make the list of benefiting cartel. For sure, it is now a status symbol.
But to further rub in this subsidy insult on all of us, the members of the cartel, who we named but could not shame, are the same ones who still strut the landscape as though they are some genuine business whiz kids. But they are no whiz kids; they are just smart Alecs who know one person who knows another person in government. They link up, and the rip-off begins. Having gone to Harvard, London, New York, Lagos and all those status-conferring elite business schools (the same school where Gadhafi’s son went and paid a little over a million pounds and was awarded a PhD without reading any book), those of us who attended or local state universities begin to feel so hugely inferior to them and grovel and lap up everything they tell us to be the only acceptable standard.
They dazzle us even more with all their power-point presentations, their impressive portfolios of degrees and all that. The result? For doing a job that hardly comes up to a quarter of what the civil servant does (for which we have refused to pay N18, 000), we foolish hand in seven-figure salaries to the neo-conmen. Yes, even our government officials, elected and appointed, also ‘fall mugu’. They engage the ‘whiz kids’ as consultants to drive government and its policies.
We soon forget that none of the men and women, in the course of history (both ancient and modern), who are on record to have developed any country ever went to those fancy schools. In fact, it was only after such men and women had completed their tenures, and had succeeded in turning their countries around, that they now sat back and put their experiences down in writing for posterity. It is those books that our new whiz kids now go and read, distort a few lines therein, use it to mask their selfish and evil interests, and begin to dazzle the rest of us. And before we know it, we abandon the commanding heights of our economy to them.
LAST LINE
But while we are naming and shaming, is it also possible to do a proper audit of what transpired in this our fuel subsidy shame? For instance, if we agree that we have been on this subsidy path for so long, how come we suddenly lost grip of it in the last nine months? Did some people take advantage of Jonathan’s freshness (and initial lack of full comprehension of the arrangement) to play a fast one on the country? How come we spent about N3.5 trillion on subsidy in the previous six years only to blow about N1.3 trillion in the last nine months? Yes, in just nine months, we blew 30% of what normally was spent in six years!
There is a danger of lumping all those companies, which honestly and genuinely did the subsidy business over the years, with those who recently entered the business, obviously when it became clear that there was a huge racket going on there. That was why the number of those who were importing fuel into the country jumped from a manageable less-than-10 figure a few years ago to the present arrangement where nearly 100 companies are involved – including furniture companies, spare parts dealers and just everybody. Or may be, the government might just allow the subsidy racket continue until it has gone round, by which time, every bonafide Nigerian would have had his chance to collect money and import fuel. Cartel or no cartel, this beneficiary thing must go round o!
But while we are naming and shaming, is it also possible to do a proper audit of what transpired in this our fuel subsidy shame? For instance, if we agree that we have been on this subsidy path for so long, how come we suddenly lost grip of it in the last nine months? Did some people take advantage of Jonathan’s freshness (and initial lack of full comprehension of the arrangement) to play a fast one on the country? How come we spent about N3.5 trillion on subsidy in the previous six years only to blow about N1.3 trillion in the last nine months? Yes, in just nine months, we blew 30% of what normally was spent in six years!
There is a danger of lumping all those companies, which honestly and genuinely did the subsidy business over the years, with those who recently entered the business, obviously when it became clear that there was a huge racket going on there. That was why the number of those who were importing fuel into the country jumped from a manageable less-than-10 figure a few years ago to the present arrangement where nearly 100 companies are involved – including furniture companies, spare parts dealers and just everybody. Or may be, the government might just allow the subsidy racket continue until it has gone round, by which time, every bonafide Nigerian would have had his chance to collect money and import fuel. Cartel or no cartel, this beneficiary thing must go round o!
No comments:
Post a Comment