THE CURSE OF OIL

THE CURSE OF OIL:

When God was handing out brains on the creation day, it is obvious that the present managers of our oil industries as presently constituted were absent. Otherwise there would have been sanity in the oil sector for now. The managers as presently constituted are a bunch of fraud. That is why today the diminutive Adams Oshiomole is commanding more follower-ship than a sovereign government, offering superior and powerful arguments, flooring Obasanjo, his advisers and NNPC officials all combined together.

An avid reader or follower of events in Nigeria would think that all that Nigerians in Diaspora can do is to write gloom and doom, but the fact is that they are reflecting the mood of the moment. Nigeria is literally shut down and nothing is moving today except the decent to Golgotha. A combination of overkill of poor leadership and a small dose of citizens'
rejection and dejection are at play here. The later is sourced from the former. It is the preoccupation of this PDP led
Regime to devalue Nigerian lives to the barest minimum.

Oil, Crude oil is the tears of the devil. It is tearing nations and everything apart leaving in its wake an insurmountable aura of anguish, hardship and penury. Locally places like Ogoni and Delta region of Nigeria for instance are up in flames. It is either that their environment has been rendered useless by oil spillage or that Government has connived with
the oil giants to silence their brightest and the best. Internationally countries like Iraq, Venezuela, Angola, Kuwait and Russia are in inferno or the other. Every kid can tell the story of Iraq and Kuwait, and the protracted war in Angola is fought over oil deposit. A hitherto peaceful village will turn to battle field once the devil's tear is discovered
underneath.

As a result the whole concept of oil exploration in Nigeria is one huge fraud and Nigeria is trudging on the red-line sinking deeper and deeper into abyss. Today nobody knows how much oil that is drilled underneath us; how much money that is remitted. The oil consortiums are given blank cheques to operate and debase the land. Even the small change that is
remitted cannot be accounted for. The ones that are accounted for are used to page awesome hotels bills for Gaius Obaseki, the MD of NNPC monolith and massage the greedy egos of our leaders.

Take a trip to any of these well managed human societies like UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait and see for yourself how countries have combined brain and brawn for common good. Dubai as a country does not have
embassy anywhere and they can only issue you visa on arrival or via your travel agent. Look around you in Nigeria, do you see any citizen of Kuwait, Dubai, Bahrain or Saudi Arabia looking for business or paid employment. That is why you do not get to hear that their citizens were killed or jailed in foreign lands. Yet Nigeria and these countries have the same
thing in common: oil! Angola government has fought for over two decades now trying to keep at bay the insurgents headed by Jonas Savimbi that was brutally murdered last year, but they have never borrowed money to prosecute the way.

Bahrain, that country that has the highest concentration of the largest Islamic institutions in the world apart from that has established the best Islamic banking system in the Middle East. Bahrain path to economic growth cannot be said to be less enviable to that of Nigeria. Malaysia which started the same way like Nigeria today has the highest sky-scrapper in the world.

It is in the light of all these that all these idle talks about deregulation irritate the ear. And it is because God does not come down to smite known criminals immediately that they are still insulting our collective sensibility at will. Any practical approach towards the resolution of the fuel issue MUST start from the refineries. The refineries must be up and running again so as to cater for our local consumption. The incurable cycle of mystery fires gobbling up the refineries each time a TAM is carried out can be checked.

Secondly, if you leave oil to international market forces or pricing, that means that oil price must react every time there is depreciation in the naira and this surely and certainly is a good recipe for Armageddon. In that condition be rest assured that two people entering a petrol station may be asked to pay different rates for the same quantity of fuel
judging from the way our naira is taking a plunge. All the monies saved from price hike in the previous regimes only found their way to private pockets which they have stashed abroad and because these villains are alive, Obasanjo cannot go after them. He is waiting for proofs as if somebody gave him that before he pounced on the Abachas, he is waiting for proofs as if he was tucked away in the outer space when IBB and company riled, defiled and sodomized this bleeding nation.

But there are people that are always ready to hang on with any government no matter how small the post is, just to belong. People who have excelled in other spheres of human endeavors only to descend stoop to low to partake
in government business. Such group is represented by Rasheed Gbadamosi, the chairman of the dubious PPPRA, the agency known for fixing fuel price. It is doubtful if this group knows the salary index of the people all they do is to connive with government and big oil companies to ambush the people. Such people have lost their power of reasoning and they behave like cock in congregation of hens, feigning ignorance of the massive build-up of people pent up anger and they are lost wherever any reasonable argument is conducted.

We must pause here to admit that we have a lot of problems in our hand. Even if Obasanjo wants to cleanse up the Augean table, where would he start? Unemployment, crime rate, corruption, poor infrastructure, high crime rate, fuel palaver, Niger Delta crisis, religious problems or what? Assuming that we have identified corruption as our bane, (and yes that is our bane) where on earth will he muster the zeal and the will to fight corruption in NNPC, NEPA, the military and paramilitary forces like Police, Customs and Immigration, CBN, NITEL, the Press, Judiciary, federal ministries and parastatals, state and local governments, foreign embassies, licensing authorities, in hospitals, in the airports and the seaports and in federal ministry of works?

November 2003