Dangote Refinery and Nigerians’ Great Expectations by Bola Bolawole

It is a terrible thing when a man’s expectations are cut off. Proverbs 23: 18 says: “For surely there is an end; and thine expectation shall not be cut off” (King James version). Proverbs 24: 14 also says: “So shall the knowledge of wisdom be to thy soul: when thou hast found it, then there shall be a reward, and thy expectation shall not be cut off”. I don’t now know where preachers, including yours truly, found the addition “the expectation of the righteous shall not be cut off”! May your expectations not be cut off!

The scripture simply says our expectation shall not be cut off, be they righteous, be they otherwise – so I suppose! But let us for a moment assume that this scripture refers only to the righteous, how do we now explain the fact that the expectations of the vast majority of Nigerians concerning the Dangote Refinery now appear to have been cut off? We are touted as the second most prayerful country in the whole world! Is it that we are religious without being righteous? Did we set our expectations too high? Were we unrealistic in our expectations

What are those expectations, to start with? One: That once the Dangote Refinery comes on stream, Nigerians will begin to enjoy cheap petrol. One of my fellow pastors even vowed that the price of a litre of petrol will crash to what operated during the Jonathan era (N187 per liter) once Dangote begins to pump out Made-in-Nigeria petrol! Two: That the coming on stream of Dangote petrol will signal an end to the perennial scarcity of the commodity and that petrol will flow yanfu-yanfu from all the filling stations!

No queues! No bribing of petrol station attendants! No keeping vigils at petrol stations! No buying of black market petrol at cut-throat prices! Motorists will just drive in into filling stations, have their fill and drive out with ease! No tension! No stress! No hassles! Aliko Dangote himself was quoted as saying that his refinery will bring an end to fuel importation and the strain on the Naira. The depreciation of the Naira is the major cause of escalating cost of goods and services all over the place.

None of these expectations has materialised even as the long-awaited streaming of the Dangote Refinery took off the ground this week. Rather, the sad news that Nigerians received was that Dangote petrol will cost more than imported petrol! Fuel scarcity has not only returned, the filling stations are empty. Trust Nigerians, rather than sell the products they have at the moment at the prevailing price, Shylock fuel station owners prefer to hoard the commodity and wait for the new price regime to take effect for them to make a kill.

Before this new Dangote Refinery wahala, I bought fuel at one NNPC filling station at N855 per litre. Now, with Dangote fuel, a litre will cost N950 at NNPC stations in Lagos. What this means is that other filling stations in Lagos will sell above that price. Usually, the five or so oil majors sell at between 30 and 50 Naira above the NNPC price while independent marketers sell at between 100 and 300 Naira above the NNPC benchmark. As we move farther away from Lagos, the price increases. In many places as we speak – that is, before the coming on stream of Dangote fuel – a litre of petrol sells for as high as 1,500 Naira or even more, especially in the black market.

Now that the official price hovers around N1000 per litre in Lagos, your guess is as good as mine concerning what to expect in the hinterland. The coming on stream of the Dangote Refinery ought to be good news that should see the dollar crash and the Naira make appreciable gains on it; the contrary, unfortunately, has been the case as the Naira continues its downward slide at both the official and black market, inching close to N1700 to a dollar. And with the NNPC benchmarking its sale of crude to Dangote on the official foreign exchange rate (which is often higher than even the black market rate), the vagaries of fluctuations on the market will continually affect the cost of petrol.

Why have the expectations of Nigerians over the Dangote Refinery been cut off? One explanation is that the crude oil the refinery is still using was imported; so the vagaries of foreign exchange volatility has come into play. When the refinery begins to buy crude from the NNPC in Naira, we should expect that to have a salutary effect on the price of fuel. Another expectation for those who believe! The discrepancies in the figures released by Dangote and NNPC over the price at which the latter lifted petrol from the former further speaks to the opaqueness and lack of transparency in the oily business of making petrol available to Nigerians.

Between Dangote and NNPC, it is difficult to know who to believe in this blame game that leaves much to be desired. If NNPC becomes the sole off-taker of Dangote’s petrol, what becomes of the independent marketers? Buying from the NNPC leaves them with no chance of competing favourably in an open market. Should they resort to importation, the same problem we thought the Dangote Refinery has helped us resolve rears its ugly head again.

The problems bedevilling the oil sector are hydra-headed, such that the Dangote Refinery alone cannot solve. There is the problem of aging infrastructure; lack of investment in the sector, compelling the oil majors to disinvest; the problems of corruption and sabotage, vandalization of pipelines and oil theft; a Petroleum Industry Act that was late in coming, and insecurity, to mention but a few.

Why are the four government-owned refineries not working? Why may they never work, if we are to believe the statements of former President Olusegun Obasanjo? Since the Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration came on stream, it has serially reneged on the datelines it gave for the refineries to roar back to life. Why?

How do we solve the problem of smuggling of petroleum products across the border? Cheap petrol here subsidizes our neighbours. The more they smuggle the commodity across the border, the more losses we incur. We must factor them into the equation if we are ever to solve this problem. Why have we not taken advantage of the vast market begging to be tapped around us? This is an adversity that we ought to have translated into opportunity a long time ago.

Now, the solution does not lie in Dangote. A monopolist will always bare its fangs. Seeing the opportunity, it will not resist sinking its fangs in your skin. Capitalists are shylocks. William Shakespeare demonstrates this very clearly in his character, Shylock, in Merchant of Venice. We cannot place the destiny of an entire nation in the hands of one man. Our subsisting experience with this man does not recommend such confidence. More refineries must come on board. Where are the modular refineries? Tinubu must endure every disappointment to ensure that the government’s four refineries roar back to life. More entrepreneurs should consider going into the downstream sector of the oil business. We have not only the market of the west African subregion at our feet but Europe’s gas market as well.

The Tinubu administration must abandon its knee jerk economic policies of tax, more tax, and still more tax and settle down to plan serious economic development programmes and policies. Managing and reinflating a deflated economy, even if that is what they inherited from a wasteful and decadent Muhammadu Buhari administration, is not rocket science. The three components we must adopt are: reducing wasteful and unnecessary expenditure, fighting corruption and blocking leakages in the system (which the administration is not doing enough); increasing expenditure by discovering new sources of income to create wealth (which it is embarking upon in the wrong direction), and stemming a bloated bureaucracy in favour of a lean and efficient administration (which it is also not doing as we speak).

Removing subsidies everywhere, imposing and hiking taxes on every conceivable item is not the same thing as creating new wealth; it is bare-faced picking the pockets of an already traumatised citizenry. Why should the Tinubu administration become notorious as a government of pick-pockets? A people taxed to death and sapped of energy, as the vast majority of Nigerians are at the moment, cannot be expected to help anyone build a prosperous and viril economy.

FEEDBACK

Good morning, Mr. Bola Bolawole, my Fajuyi Hall adjacent room-mate while at Unife (I read Geology) and, later, you were my Editor at The PUNCH. You influenced my being employed then as Energy Correspondent. That was after my freelancing with The Guardian for some time. It was my formal employment with The PUNCH that opened the way for me to become what I am today in life. Incidentally, Thẹ PUNCH was punched out by thẹ maximum ruler, General Sani Abacha, and so I became jobless again but my being a PUNCH journalist paved the way for me, with another open door as I stumbled into becoming the Secretariat Administrator of the Nigeria Internet Group, formed to promote internet awareness in Nigeria under the tutelage of the Nigeria Communications Commission. I was overseeing the running of the secretariat and this made me travel far and near, the world over. My dear brother, I say a very big thank you for counting me worthy for that PUNCH employment. It made me know the workings within NEPA and brought about my interactions with the high and mighty in the power sector then. – Obalolu Adekanmi.

Your write-ups sound good and give me some form of relief that some journalists have not abandoned the root core of their profession. How I wish there are many journalists who will dig deeper to expose the demon called CORRUPTION, which has plagued this country and has turned the wheel of progress backward, despite the country’s huge resources which can make it a real giant of the world. May I use this medium to request your office to carry out a similar investigation on LASU campus at Epe where students are subjected to serious inhuman treatment. No water, no light in a university environment! The hostels are like prison rooms! I strongly believe that a write-up of this type will help to curb the activities of those who have now made corrupt practices their vocation. – Abiodun Adeyemi.

It is with great relief and joy that I want to thank you for lending your voice to the 18-year age restriction on students writing WAEC, NECO and UTME. What becomes of our teeming youths if they cannot write these exams? The ripple effects in the next three years are better imagined than felt. – Paul Iretiola Jegede.

Wole Olaoye’s “Let there be light!” is an alibi for the collective barrenness, emptiness and scantiness of our tertiary institutions! That the entire country still wallows in darkness in spite of the so-called Faculty of Engineering that litter our campuses is laughable. How can the universities seek solutions to their power problems from poorly-conceived, poorly-funded, poorly-equiped and poorly-executed Rural Electrification abracadabra programs? If Ife is worth the greatness attached to her name, her army of scientists, technologists and technicians should by now be reputed for Made-in-Ife turbines and other electrification equipment! We should look in the direction of Ife, the Source, for a solution to our electricity problems; not to Germany, China or anywhere else. If Akoka is truly great, if Ilorin is greater, the above ought to have happened. It is sickening to hear the humongous amount being committed to pay electricity bills by the Ivory Tower, that is, if the figures are not hyped. If they cannot help us, they should at least help themselves! – Nojeem Jimoh.

• Former Editor of PUNCH newspapers, Chairman of its Editorial Board and Deputy Editor-in-chief, BOLAWOLE was also the Managing Director/ Editor-in-chief of The WESTERNER newsmagazine. He writes the ON THE LORD’S DAY column in the Sunday TRIBUNE and TREASURES column in NEW TELEGRAPH newspaper on Wednesdays. He is also a public affairs analyst on radio and television.