By Fred Chukwuelobe
What does the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) want?
Who is it working for? Nigerians or who?
Why are Nigerians tolerating its inadequacies and manifest incompetence and inefficiencies?
Instead of being revenue generating source for the country and bringing the needed foreign currency, it has become a drainpipe for years.
Why is it bent on punishing Nigerians and pushing the pump price of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), otherwise known as fuel, beyond the average man?
For several years, the company has been unable to refine one drop of the much-sought-after Bonny light in any of the four refineries in Port Harcourt, new Port Harcourt, Warri, and Kaduna.
Instead it has spent trillions of US dollars importing the products, which it exports to foreign refineries for others to refine for it.
Meanwhile, it has spent billions of dollars paying salaries and emoluments of children of the privileged who sit down ‘to cook the books’ and smile home with fat salaries for doing nothing.
For years, these same workers have gone on different overseas trainings and workshops to ‘learn how to export crude oil and import the refined products’.
When president Bola Ahmed Tinubu assumed office, he retained the oil company’s Group Managing Director (GMD) Mele Kyari and allowed him to restructure the company from NNPC to NNPCL, becoming its first Group Chief Executive Officer (GCEO) despite his obvious inadequacies. President Buhari appointed Kyari as the group managing director (GMD) of the defunct NNPC.
Till date, he remains in office and is supervising the continuing increase in prices of petroleum products and lack of accountability in the industry.
When Dangote was completing his refinery, stories were told and ‘retold’ of how much the NNPCL invested in the brand new facility thought to be the solution to frequent hikes in prices and frequent fuel shortages and its attendant queues at filling stations.
Till date, nobody knows how much the NNPCL invested in Dangote Refinery and nobody knows how much Dangote paid to acquire the land on which his company sits.
Enter Dangote Refinery and before its products would hit the markets controversy erupted:
1. Its products was said to be inferior to imported ones; Dangote denied that.
2. It was not ready to begin production; Aliko Dangote denied that and made startling revelations of how much he paid for the land acquisition ($100m) and asked those who have a refinery in Malta to tell Nigerians why they’re insisting on importing the product instead of allowing his refinery do the job.
Finally, they allowed him to buy their crude and refine it. To do that, they first increased the price of their own imported fuel.
Then they became the chief marketer of Dangote refinery and the chief buyer. They lined hundreds of tankers through the narrow, famished Lekki-Epe Expressway and began lifting the products.
To justify their high prices, they claimed Dangote sells refined fuel to them at N898 per liter, meaning that its recently approved pump price of N855 per liter was unsustainable, which would lead to further adjustments of its official pump price of N855.
Dangote Refinery promptly denied that claim, and the NNPCL is yet to tell Nigerians why it is insisting in pushing the pump prices higher and punishing Nigerians.
Meanwhile, many private filling stations adjusted their own pump prices as they deem necessary. Some are selling at N900 per liter. Others N1,000, N1,100, N1,150, etc. In parts of the country, it is N1,300, N1,400. I bought N1,400 in Anambra state.
While all these shenanigans are playing out, docile Nigerians are busy queuing up, ‘suffering and smiling’. Prices of essential goods and services which are determined by fuel prices are skyrocketing. Schools fees are being adjusted and the recently approved minimum wage of N70,000 has become meaningless.
That leaves me with these questions:
1. Who is the NNPCL working for?
2. Why is it bent on hiking the pump price of fuel?
3. Why is the GCEO of the company still in office despite his obvious failures and inability to tame the NNPCL monster?
4. When would Nigerians rise up and insist that the NNPCL be held to account for its failures for decades?
5. What the h*ll is going on? What happened to the subsidy that was removed? Why have we not seen the benefits, that is, if there was subsidy and it was removed?
Please, if anybody knows the answers to these questions, let me know. I am at a loss as to why nobody has been able to tame this NNPCL monster.
NB: Fred Chukwuelobe, was a Special Assistant to former Governor of Anambra, Chris Ngige on Media and Publicity.
