The National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas (NUPENG), has declared war on the Nigerian people. It has vowed to cripple the economy if the federal government sells its moribund, cash-guzzling refineries. NUPENG, an amalgam of tanker drivers and other blue collar workers in the nation’s kleptocratic oil and gas industry, is no mean enemy of the Nigerian people.
The union has a penchant for transferring its aggression on the Nigerian people by calling out its workers and imposing excruciating haulage-induced fuel scarcity on the land each time it has a score to settle with the federal government.
The union is poised to protect the jobs of its members at the colossal cost of making Nigeria perpetually dependent on fuel imports while billions of dollars budgeted annually for spurious turn around maintenance (TAM) of the moribund refineries remain unaccounted for.
The story of the four refineries is heart-rending. Nigeria burns its candle from both ends as it maintains unproductive refineries and imports practically all its refined petroleum products needs.
Even the 450, 000 barrels of crude oil allocated to the four refineries daily as feedstock is not accounted for. A recent report of the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) to the House of Representatives portrays the refineries as one huge conduit pipe through which politicians and top industry technocrats swindle Nigeria.
The report shows that the Port Harcourt Refinery was allocated 161, 916 barrels of crude per day (bpd) in 2009. It managed to refine 19, 363 bpd during the year. In 2010, the refinery was allocated 166, 523 bpd. It refined 34, 703 bpd. It was allocated 164, 454 bpd in 2011. It refined 45, 394 bpd. No one could account for the hundreds of millions of barrels of crude oil that the refinery could not process.
The crude oil allocation fraud in the refineries is a tip of the iceberg. Last year Mrs. Diezani , the minister of petroleum, obtained about $1.6 billion for the TAM of the four refineries. She assured Nigerians that the TAM would raise the capacity utilization of the refineries to 70 per cent. Today we all know that someone was being economical with the truth. It’s either the minister was thoroughly deceived by the dubious technocrats in Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), or she was part of the scam.Either way, she is responsible for the failure of the refineries to assuage Nigeria’s petroleum products import jinx.
The current scarcity of petrol indicates that NNPC lacks the integrity and skill to manage the refineries. The solution lies in selling them off to private investors.
The blackmailers in NUPENG have ironically forgotten what happened to their colleagues in the Nigeria Telecommunications Limited (NITEL). NITEL workers resisted moves to sell the company when the sale would have benefitted both the workers and the federal government. The workers are the greatest losers today because no investor would touch NITEL with a 10-metre pole. They lost all their entitlements. NUPENG is herding its members in the direction of that blind alley. Aliko Dangote, the world’s 23rd richest man has dared the voluble men in the National Assembly who have spent five eternal years debating the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) without any chance of passing it.
The gullible ones among us were made to believe that without the passage of the bill no private investor would build a refinery in Nigeria. Now Dangote and his creditors have passed a vote of confidence on the downstream sector of the Nigerian oil industry without the still-born PIB.
A consortium of foreign banks has granted Africa’s leading industrialist a colossal loan of $9 billion to build a refinery with the combined capacity of all of Nigeria’s cash-guzzling and archaic refineries.
Dangote’s industrial master stroke is to take absolute control of any industry he enters.
With the industrial giant poised to control the downstream sector of the petroleum industry, NUPENG can only blackmail the federal government for at most three more years. By that time Nigeria’s four refineries would have become some glorified scrap that even NUPENG would be begging the federal government to sell them and pay off its members.
Unfortunately, NUPENG’s fears cannot be dismissed with a wave of the hand. The union is battling to protect the interest of its members albeit at the expense of the welfare of 170 million Nigerians.
The union is justifiably worried. The federal government has an uncanny record of reneging on the payment of workers’ severance package. It may therefore sell the refineries and pocket the proceeds, while well-wired politicians and civil servants lodge workers’ entitlements in banks and watch whether someone would make enough noise to warrant the release of one per cent of the sum to settle the noise makers. That probably is responsible for NUPENG’s resort to blackmail tactics.
The way out of the thorny issue is for the federal government to make a clean break from its dubious past by negotiating a transparent severance package for the workers to facilitate the sale of the refineries before Dangote’s plant comes on stream. If the two parties ignore the lurking danger, they would suffer the NITEL treatment.
