One of the hottest trending websites at the moment must be that of the Nigeria National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL).
The reason is simple. And quite obvious too. The corporation has put up an employment notice and virtually everyone – employed, underemployed, unemployed are rushing there and perhaps, going for broke, in a manner of speaking. Traffic is so heavy on the site, it must feel like being on the Third Mainland Bridge in Lagos.
It reminds one of when 13,000 applicants including PhD and master degree holders, applied for 1,000 vacancies as executive truck drivers for the Dangote Group in 2012. With the NNPC, and against the backdrop of the current economic situation, the tide of applications for limited vacancies is only to be imagined.
Indeed, who doesn’t want a fat pay cheque at any time and season? Earning a six or seven figure salary can be taken for granted if one succeeds and gets hired. Nearly everything afterwards is an added advantage – including the privilege of just hanging around and waiting to get paid.
It would be a national pride if the company were to be delivering sterling performance and contributions to national development commensurate with emoluments that are difficult to get even in blue-chip companies.
Yes, were NNPCL – Nigeria’s sole monopoly in the distribution of petroleum products down to retail level – up and doing even at mere 50 percent production capacity, the price of petrol, not to mention availability across the country, would be a much different story.
But its four refineries in Port Harcourt, Eleme, Warri and Kaduna are dead and have been so for decades. Yet, year in and out, the corporation is recruiting staff by the hundreds. To do what exactly, you may ask? The question is pertinent, given that the corporation’s refineries can’t even brew a bucket of water despite ghosting over $25billion in costly maintenance.
And just when we thought a private investor has come to the rescue, to deliver us from NNPCL’s incompetence or sabotage or both, the corporation and its side chicks are trying to make it impossible for the problem to be solved.
Who did this to us?! This cynical and sarcastic question I have heard time and again. And my usual riposte in soliloquy has always been: Who but us? Who are the workers in NNPCL or associated regulatory agencies? Who are the ministers for Petroleum Resources, Industries, Trade/Investment, etc? Who but Nigerians?
It’s all us! Us as politicians, as community and national elites, as cabals, as vested interests, as saboteurs, as provincial champions of tribe and religion, as unpatriotic citizens, as opportunists and soldiers of fortune, as collaborators and proxies for mercantilists home and abroad, as visionless and uncommitted leaders at every level. It’s us over and over again!
How else is one to understand the role of public agencies who make an art of profiting from undermining and undercutting our very own fatherland? Who runs down our institutions through rackets and collusions that enhances their personal wealth and engenders societal impoverishment? It’s our countrymen, our friends and proxies.
There’s no isolated case. Carcases litter the landscape. The abandoned Ajaokuta Steel Complex, Mambilla Power Plant, the dead textile factories in Kano, Kaduna, Lagos; the dead pharmaceutical and products companies in Zaria and Jos; the abandoned farm estates and agro-processing industries across many states and regions, the dead NNPC refineries, the vast expanses of agricultural land that have become habitations for terrorists and criminals – must leave many a reflective person in depression and tears.
Like a mother gulping up her offspring, so have officials of state and corporations cannibalised on Nigeria, practically eating the country alive – like hyenas do prey. Maniacs with a compulsive acquisition syndrome (apologies, Farida Waziri), have turned our patrimony to a soft target. They largely account for why we remain a poor country full of millionaires without personal enterprise.
We have been so adept at it for decades and running up to a century, that only a look at other countries of the world with our kind of history and background, can actually cast but a pale shadow of how far we have regressed from the noble path.
And how confounding does it get? There’s nowhere else in the world where citizens connive and conspire with officials to burst pipelines, cut off metal railings on bridges, dig up buried cables and saw off overhanging ones, hark off railway tracks, hand guns to criminals and wait for returns, generally destroy public infrastructure and live to tell the story as well as enjoy the proceeds.
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We tell ourselves nostalgic stories about Malaysia, Korea, Singapore, UAE, Brazil, India and many more. We are good at travelling to those countries to get relief from our self-inflicted headaches, and for as many a reason as even to celebrate birthdays.
But right under our noses we smell progress in Egypt, South Africa, Botswana, small Gabon and even smaller Rwanda. We tell these stories with a tone of regret but without the intent to repent. Not even when we voted for change did we change our ways.
And just when we thought there was a breather, howbeit if only just in one sector – some long sought fresh air, we are on the verge of doing it again to Dangote, the risk taker.
And so one must ask: why is NNPCL or its regulatory agencies afraid of Dangote? Or better still: Who is afraid of Nigeria’s innate capacity – as has been resoundingly proven by Dangote – to make huge and functional investments in local oil refining?
If NNPC is afraid of monopoly, why don’t they get their own refineries working to compete with the monopolist? It is quite a paradox that NNPC, a monopoly back-to-back, does not want Nigerians to enjoy competitive pricing which Dangote refinery started when it crashed the price of diesel. The fulminations about quality or license is premeditated and sheer drivel. It’s economic sabotage!
If there has been a monopoly in the oil sector, it is NNPC. This monopoly seeks to frustrate a private investor who wants to do what it hasn’t been able to do. And NNPC wants all Nigerians to rise in applause. No we won’t!
If any changes will happen, then NNPC must loosen its grip on the oil sector – that grip of an octopus – tight and fast like a suction pad. We can’t have a gigantic refinery in a crude oil producing country having to import crude from other countries. Or for that matter, a Nigerian having to buy Nigerian crude in Nigeria and pay in dollars. Again, it is economic sabotage.
If history is anything to go by, that is how we ate up the rubber plantations which supplied latex for the manufacture of tyres in Nigeria and sent Michelin and Dunlop packing; killed the oil palm estates which produced high quality raw materials for pharmaceutical industries and plants; undermined the vehicle assembly plants in Kaduna, Bauchi, Ibadan, Anambra; and systematically asphyxiated the paper mills of Okwu-Iboku. The wreckages are just too many to count.
It would seem that there are people sworn to some secret oath that a functional Nigeria is over their dead bodies. Vested interests have been at the heart of Nigeria’s underdevelopment. And they have succeeded overwhelmingly in keeping the richest country in Africa on its knees while becoming fabulously rich by doing so.
They are not letting go of the country’s jugular vein, which is the oil producing sector shrouded in opacity. But they’ve got a worthy adversary in Dangote!
Any other country would have crumbled many times over. But Nigeria is so resiliently Nigerian that it has continued to defy all the assault just as it defies doomsday prophesies.
NNPC may employ the whole world for all I care, but Dangote Refinery has come to stay! And it will work, so NNPC and NDMPRA should park well.
Julius Ogar writes from Utako, Abuja