BY OIKONOMIA WITH LEKAN SOTE
Nigeria’s Federal Government is now an evangelist, willing to convert owners of illegal refineries into legit business cooperatives to make up for the failure of the three-and-half refineries owned by Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation, or Company Limited, that gulps so much money without producing one litre of petroleum products.
This is a more profitable and humane way of dealing with the issue of illegal refineries that emit dangerous soot that kills people. By converting those hitherto regarded as criminals into cooperatives, the government will be gaining so much.
Sharon Ikeazor, Minister of State for the Environmental, avers that “the much talked about Port Harcourt soot is caused by the activities of artisanal (euphemism for illegal) refineries.”
The criminal turned legit entrepreneurs will escape poverty, significantly reduce cost of monitoring illegal refineries, raise Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product, reduce unemployment, pay taxes to the government and make petroleum products more available. And no one will find it necessary to break the crude oil and petroleum products pipelines anymore.
More importantly is that Nigeria’s import bill will significantly reduce. Also, Nigeria should take advantage of its large-scale production to be able to export petroleum products to West Africa in the medium term, and other parts of Africa, in the long-term, and earn forex.
If the refineries become more stable, they should be able to transit into bigger and more conventional refineries, and add production of fertilizer for use in the agricultural sector of the economy. Of course, there are other advantages to these capabilities.
This is a classic case of a win-win situation. The new entrepreneurs and their employees will become responsible and respected members of the society, the government will be relieved of the security burden, and have more revenue to discharge its welfare responsibilities to Nigerians.
Whereas the NNPC refineries have the capacity to process 445,000 barrels of crude oil per day, which they are not achieving at all, the privately-owned Dangote Refinery, in Lekki, Lagos State, is expected to process up to 650,000 barrels of crude oil per day.
When Dangote Refinery comes upstream in September 2022, as promised by its President, Aliko Dangote, it will be the largest single-train refinery in the world. It is expected that it will run efficiently because it is a private enterprise that won’t tolerate bureaucracy.
One sometimes wonders why those shameless Nigerians who earn remunerations while pretending to be working in NNPC do not ever think they should be patriotic for once by resigning and going back to wherever they call home.
If they go home, the money wasted on them can be diverted to more useful purposes. All they do these days is no more than superintending the oil depots, and both the 4000 kilometres of crude pipeline and the 5000 kilometre petroleum products pipeline.
These responsibilities can be discharged by people who do not necessarily have to be very expensive personnel. To mention just one, Mele Kyari, the Group Managing Director of NNPC, is overqualified, and therefore, should be replaced by someone without his intimidating curriculum vitae. A brilliant DHL alumni, and PhD, should be able to run the depots, trucks and the crude oil and finished product pipelines
Brilliant personnel with a logistics background should be able to do the job that any GMD of NNPC does. What obtains in NNPC is a Rube Goldberg, a complicated device that performs simple tasks in an indirect and convoluted manner.
