Fuel crisis and the unending blame game

PETROLEUM now seems more available in more parts of the country after four weeks of contrived scarcity. During these four weeks, Nigerians have almost literally been through hell and back. In the first two weeks of the scarcity, when things looked very dire, resourceful Nigerians still managed to be on the road.

They bent over backwards to ensure that they got fuel to power their vehicles. The number of vehicles on the road did not appear to have gone down considerably from what we were used to.
This created the illusion that things were getting better, thus helping the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation and the conniving marketers of petroleum products to sustain the lie that fuel was getting to more states across the country after the Nigerian government agreed to some of the latter’s demands. But this claim would be exposed for the cheap lie that it was within days.
Thus, even now, four weeks after long queues of vehicles started emerging at fuel stations, the hostage situation in which the fuel scarcity has consigned Nigerians still remains. Nigerians now know when and where to purchase fuel products in their different localities. They, however, pay considerably higher rates per litre of fuel.
Getting Nigerians to pay more is no doubt the direction we were headed all the while. This has been the long time plan of fuel marketers and owners of fuel stations who never waste time to shut their gates and hoard available stock at the mere hint of possible increase in fuel prices. Now Nigerians are paying between N130 and N170 per litre of fuel, the product appears to be more available.
This is against the backdrop of the fact that the official rate per litre of petroleum still remains N87! At a time when the price of petrol has fallen well below the expectation of the most starry-eyed sellers around the world, the so-called subsidised product is experiencing a spike in price in a country that is one of the world’s major producers of it. This is the kind cruel and laughable irony we should not be reporting about our country. But the government in office sits back and looks on in bemused silence.
When shortly before the March 28 election, the government took the political decision to cut down the price of petrol per litre to its old price of N87, the fuel stations had to be threatened before they would comply with the ‘new’ price regime. But there was hardly a hint of scarcity of fuel before these same fuel stations started shutting their gates four weeks ago, in anticipation of another increase in price.
This started off the contrived scarcity that has remained with us for four straight weeks without the government of the day being able to arrest the drift into anarchy. This is a case of hostage taking, an attempt at holding Nigerians to ransom and arm-twisting them to pay far more for a product that we are continually told is subsidised.
And when Nigerians ask what the matter is about, they are helplessly told by the government to hold marketers of petrol responsible. The marketers who are often surrogates, friends and relations of government officials, also retort that the government should be blamed for the pain Nigerians are going through for its failure to honour agreements reached with them.
Both the marketers and the people in government operate like a mafia group or cultists out to protect one another’s interests. Otherwise, some people should be answering now for what has been happening in the last several weeks. But nobody has been held to account.
What we see is a game of buck passing between the government and the marketers. It is a clear case of failure occasioned by poor or zero governance. Now the marketers are claiming they are being owed hundreds of billions of naira which are credit facilities extended to them by lending institutions- they claim they are being owed these huge amounts by the government for supplying petrol.
The government disputes but does not appear able to convincingly deny these figures. Rather than providing a figure of its own that is credible and verifiable, either side to the dispute has been talking as if there were no guidelines to operations in the oil sector.
But indeed that is what it all seems like now: that there were no guidelines or commonly accepted regulations guiding the operations between the NNPC, its subsidiaries and the oil marketers. It has been a clear case of ‘anything goes’, in which everyone has been making their kill at the greater expense of the majority of Nigerians.
The scramble to get what anyone can before a new government gets into office on 29th May has been identified as a major reason for this artificial scarcity. Oil marketers and government officials in the NNPC, related ministries and agencies, are all scrambling to grab the most they can before a Muhammadu Buhari that might not honour any dirty deals gets into office. This is the main reason for the induced scarcity- to force the hands of a corrupt, weak and departing administration to make concessions or honour shady deals that a new administration might not accept.
Muhammadu Buhari has already indicated interest in looking into some of the activities of the NNPC and, perhaps, questions raised about their operations by the Pricewaterhouse Coopers Report. It should not matter how and when some of these agreements being hurriedly perfected now between the NNPC and oil marketers were reached, the Buhari administration should take a second, third and fourth look at them.
They should be discarded where there are convincing proofs that they would not bear scrutiny. If the marketers are prepared to make Nigerians suffer for their individual and corporate greed, Buhari should be prepared to ensure that every kobo paid them was earned.
In the same manner should the new administration investigate other government agencies and ministries such as those of the Federal Inland Revenue Service, the Nigerian Customs and Excise and the Ministry of Finance among others.
The type of blame game Nigerians have witnessed, with the refusal to take responsibility for the failures in the polity by officials of the Jonathan administration, simply must go with the administration.
While the administration must accept its complicity in many of the corrupt activities that have brought us as a country to the disgraceful situation where we cannot guarantee the availability of a product that we produce, the post May 29 administration should be prepared to look into the books and where necessary hold accountable culpable members of the Jonathan administration and others in the private sector. This could be a good way to begin the urgent task of demolishing the house of corruption nurtured by the outgoing administration.