There is nothing that the story of oil will not do in this country. It is black but a devious beauty. It is a tale of a beautiful woman or what poets call a femme fatale.
Nobel Laureate Garcia Marquez in his immortal novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, wafts the tale of Remedios the Beauty, a celestial vision that titillates the fancies of mortal man.
Men lose their way, croon and drool in vain, fall and even stalk her bathroom. But the beauty does not fall for anyone. She glides on, tragedy in her wake.
So we may say of black gold, our black beauty. It is a story that entails both our most famous billionaire and our most famous trade unions.
Dangote versus NUPENG. Dangote versus PENGASSAN. But normally, if these two forces met in battle, where would the popular army amass? The polls would naturally say the unions have it.
Dangote outflanks the unions in popular favour today. That is the sorcery of oil. It is what happens when, in the words of Shakespeare, “witchcraft joins with beauty.” It is, on the surface, a contest between the people and the billionaire.
The people lost. It is, of course, a false victory.
The people seem to lose because of what trade unions can mean today. They hark back to American revolutionary cry to yank off the yoke of colonial England: “No taxation without representation.” We have unions without representation.
First, it was NUPENG, and the fight over trucks. They say Dangote was going to take over their business. They have thousands of Trucks to Dangote’s a fraction of theirs. But they were defending their corruption of the oil tanking business in cahoots with top fang-men in the oil business, including the NNPC. Dangote had come to intrude but they wanted to “chop” alone.
Dangote may have a few trucks today but, maybe, tomorrow, he will outpace them. They wanted to nip the billionaire in the bud. We are not there yet.
And if they wanted to fight, it is what the Yorubas call Ija’gboro, a street brawl. In school, we called it “two fighting.”
They fought shy of going to court. That is what the United States did to tame Bill Gates, and what the European Union has done to Google. Gates was a boa constrictor. He had no pity.
Business men are no mice. Hence Philosopher Proudhon says, “all wealth is theft.” Don’t expect a milk of human kindness from a capitalist. Capital has no bloodstream; hence it can shed blood.
PENGASSAN is no different. The fight was over labour.
The man fired 800 workers, a stunning number. PENGASSAN wanted revenge. Rather than take it on Dangote, they took it on the people. Festus Osifo and company’s agenda did everything that made the people hate bad governments and oppressors.
First, they endangered our daily bread by trying to cut off pipelines that funneled the fuel of the economy. It was to reduce the wealth of the nation. NNPC said output dropped 16 per cent just in those few days. That meant fuel scarcity, rise in inflation because transporters would pass on the cost down to the consumer. It also means negating the downward trend of inflation in the past few months.
Two, they would compromise national security. Oil and gas pipelines bake our bread and make us safe. Pipeline busters are often men of the underworld: militants, hoodlums, bandits, etc.
It shows that they had taken over the role of the criminal. They had turned themselves into corporate fangs. They are the new corporate raider, raiding the peace of the land. Labour union as terror.
In the past, the labour union was a terror of ideology. We have a name once associated with NUPENG and PENGASSAN. It is Frank Kokori. He is the first name in oil heroism in Nigeria. He may be abstract to many. But when heroes matter, Kokori is named.
During the tumult of our democracy struggles, the army lost sleep because of him. Whether they slept or rose, they had nightmares about this man.
Kokori was the secretary, and he was the man who signed off or signed on for strike. If our present oil agitators are seeking their pockets, he was living a cause above oil and gas. Kokori gave up the promise of compromise with Abacha and goons. He shunned bribes or seductions. Not for him a big car, or a holiday in Honolulu, or a mansion in southern France. He wanted peace and food and representation with the people. He wanted the military to vacate power and hand the mandate to democracy’s jewel: the people.
He did not want Abiola’s ballot to yield to the bullet. He won the election. The people had spoken. They wanted him as president.
The country was to shut down unless they bowed to the popular will or what Jean Jacque Rouseau called the “collective will.” If the military would not, he would not. Kokori became a vagabond for the people. He moved from place to place, hotel to hotel.
He never saw wife or family. He never attended parties or funerals. He never had oxygen outside an enclosed place except when he was on the run.
But he never surrendered until he was betrayed. That is the quintessence of a union leader.
Today, the folks who control PENGASSAN and NUPENG are money men, so, it is not a billionaire versus the masses, but a big rich man versus a cartel of rich men who masquerade as the people’s conscience.
The men had the guts to stop our spigot of life, our economic jugular, and yet they claim they love us.
That is the story of black beauty. It is a dangerous beauty like Marquez’s Remedios the Beauty. It provokes ire and turbulence like the Trojan War that Helen of Troy gave us, the beauty in the telling of Homer’s epic The Iliad.
But we can make our black beauty a sublime one, of grace and prosperity like the black beauty Shakespeare serenaded in his Sonnet.
The bard laments, though, that black beauty has been profaned, just like our crude oil. For him black “beauty (is) slandered with a bastard shame.” He adds that “Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower, but is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.”
PENGASSAN and NUPENG have cast a shame on black gold as crude beauty.
NB: Sam Omatseye is a respected columnist with The Nation
