Time to unmask and bring them to judgement

Former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, took the heat off my zone when, on July 25, he urged President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to bring the fuel subsidy cabal that had held the nation hostage for decades to book. Dogara bared his mind while answering questions from newsmen after attending a thanksgiving church service to mark the successful completion of the six-year tenure of Rev. (Dr.) Yunusa Nmadu Jnr as General Secretary, Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA) in Kaduna.

“We stand by him on the subsidy removal, but he must be courageous to pursue the subsidy cabals, recover all they stole from them and prosecute them accordingly,” Dogara told the newsmen

This is exactly my position; except that I had wanted to do what elders advice in a situation like this, to wit; that we should first drive away the thief before chastising the owner of the stolen item for carelessness. I mean I had wanted to recover from the shock of the subsidy removal just like millions of Nigerians before asking that the big stick be wielded on those who so demonised fuel subsidy to the point that government had to jettison it.

Whereas there is nothing inherently wrong with fuel subsidy. Indeed, there is hardly any country that does not subsidise one thing or the other. It is only a question of priority. Even the almighty United States of America subsidises agriculture, oil and energy as well as some housing, automakers and healthcare. The U.S. spends $20bn yearly on fossil fuels subsidies, with a whopping $16bn on oil and gas alone and the remaining $4bn on the coal industry. Great Britain has spent about £40bn in energy subsidies since it began to help households and businesses cope with increased power bills caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year. Germany, France, Canada, etc. all subsidise one thing or the other. So, there is nothing inherently wrong with subsidy. The problem is with the Nigerian bastardisation of it.

Just last week Monday, former governor of Bauchi State, and former Minister of Aviation, Isa Yuguda, too restated the obvious: that the monies being paid as subsidy on fuel products in Nigeria was a scam. Yuguda, who spoke on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily, during an interview added an incredible dimension to the subsidy story when he said that the subsidy cabal had become so rich that they besieged  a former president to help end the scam.

“I remember a friend of mine in the oil industry, who during a meeting of an economic think tank. He called the then president aside and said, ‘Mr President, please stop this subsidy, we are tired of making money’”. He added that “We’re bringing in this fuel at an elevated cost and half of it is exported out of Nigeria by the same people collecting money for it.

“Subsidy was claimed on pipelines that never existed. Invoice is created and NNPC just pays”

Yuguda noted that as far back as 2009, a committee headed by him had uncovered the scam and drawn government’s attention to it. Now, the scam has grown beyond tolerable limits.

“The records are all there, and there is no time limit to investigate these people. If government has the political will, these individuals can be held to account”, he said.

Yuguda said former President Muhammadu Buhari cannot claim ignorance of the scam because he was not only president, he also doubled as Minister of Petroleum. This would seem to suggest that the matter could not have been frontally tackled because of the caliber of those involved. I agree with Yuguda that former President Buhari cannot totally escape blame in this matter, at least in the eight years he was in power. He it was that imposed the burden of overseeing the energy sector on himself. I wonder what he knows about the industry in this century. The fact is that the oil sector that Buhari chose to oversee when he was president was quite different from the oil sector he left in the 1980s. I have had cause to refer to the president several times even when he held sway that he was an analogue president in a digital age. Times have changed. So have oil and other scams. The result could not have been different from what Buhari’s government ended up with after eight years of unmeritorious service and unmitigated disaster.

Read Also: Sultan, Niger Delta leaders back Tinubu over fuel subsidy, others

As for Yuguda’s subsidy thief friend, It is difficult to believe that any human being making money would ever want the source of that money to dry up. Money is never enough for the owner; the more you have, the more you crave for more. That is the lie in the claim that the cabal was tired of making money from the scam. The friend must have been tipsy or spoken in one of his unguarded moments as distinct from a statement from a penitent mind. If the cabal had been remorseful, or if they had truly had enough money and they didn’t want more, it would not have required government’s intervention to end the fraud.

Be that as it may, how Nigeria, a major producer of crude oil became a major importer of petroleum products bares restating even if it is well known. Nigeria has four refineries none of which has functioned for years despite huge sums allocated for their turn-around maintenance (TAM). Just how terribly wasteful and corrupt we are as a nation can be seen in what we have spent on the so-called TAM. A whopping $26.5bn over the years! This is capable of building three new refineries given the cost analysis of refinery projects across the world. Dangote Refinery, Africa’s largest petrochemical refinery and the world’s largest single train petroleum refining facility capable of processing about 650,000 barrels per day cost $19bn!

Despite not functioning, government has continued to pay workers in the refineries and pick sundry other bills. What we have spent on the TAM, according to The Guardian, is 10 times higher than our 10-year budget for education. As a matter of fact, the newspaper reports that the $1.5bn awarded in 2021 for the TAM of the Port Harcourt Refinery was higher than the total capital allocation to the health sector from 2009 to 2018.

Still, Nigeria became a net importer of fuel. At the last count, the country was said to be consuming about 60 million litres of petrol daily. We all knew this was a farce. As Yuguda noted, about half of the fuel we imported was being exported to neighbouring countries by the same people importing the fuel. That explained why our neighbours started groaning almost immediately the new regime of subsidy withdrawal took off in the country on June 1. But that shouldn’t worry us a bit because, in life, self preservation comes first. Even God did not enjoin us to love our neighbour more than ourselves. We could not have been dying in installments only because want to please our neighbours. If we fail to do the rightful on time, we and our neighbours would end up in the grave, or be forced to travel the routes we initially should have travelled but didn’t travel, at greater cost than we are paying today.

At this juncture, one cannot but ask what has become of the much celebrated subsidy probe that was conducted by the House of Representatives Ad Hoc Committee on Fuel Subsidy Management in 2012? The report, which indicted several operators and players in the downstream petroleum sector over their roles that led to the loss of about N1 trn to mismanagement and misappropriation of funds under the Petroleum Subsidy Fund also made what could be termed far-reaching recommendations. Part of its findings was that if our refineries produce at their optimum capacity of 450,000 bpd, it is more than enough to meet the local demand for petrol, then estimated at about 33 million litres per day and 10 million litres of household kerosine (HHK). This means there would even be excess of about seven million litres of petrol, for instance.

Similarly, some companies were indicted for collecting about $$337,842,663.86 and $64,767,763.22 forex in 2010 and 2011, respectively, without importing fuel. Although the chairman of the probe panel, Farouk Lawan, was later jailed for demanding bribe from Femi Otedola, one of the people whose companies were being investigated, this should not render the whole report useless. The government may find aspects of it useful. But if the government feels otherwise, it should institute its own probe.

What is important is that we get to the root of this matter once and for all. It is annoying seeing wicked people who inflicted so much pain on fellow human beings and who should be in jail, roaming the streets and flaunting their Ill-gotten wealth.

It is just that ours is not a nation that punishes for bad governance; otherwise all those who had managed our petroleum sector would by now be facing one probe or another for subjecting a major crude producer to perpetual importation of finished petroleum products. It is their failure or refusal to do their work diligently that has led us to the point of almost criminalising fuel subsidy. We cannot continue to sustain refineries that are consuming unproductively.

Who are those Customs officials who looked the other way when tankers fully loaded with petrol were taking our fuel to neighbouring countries? Every year, we promote several Ćustoms personnel, including those at the borders. For doing what? Who are the marketers involved. Who are their collaborators in NNPC, etc?

All of them must be unmasked, even if they are ghosts, and prosecuted. We have got to the point where we cannot continue to reward idleness, cluelessness, indolence and incompetence. If the government has to set up special courts to try subsidy thieves and others who had caused us economic adversity, so be it. We cannot afford their trials in the regular courts. Of course they would have all the privileges of an accused in the special courts, except that their matters would not take eternity to be decided. There won’t be room for time-wasting legal gymnastics. Their trial and judgment would be swift and those found guilty would be served their due comeuppance. The pains they inflicted on Nigerians and even the economy cannot allow their cases to drag intermittently until we lose track of their crimes.

I agree with both Dogara and Yuguda that; as for pursue, the Tinubu administration must pursue the subsidy thieves. As for catching up, it must catch up with them; as for overtaking, it must overtake them, and as for taking back what they had stolen, it must ensure they vomit or excrete same.

This is the least the administration owes millions of Nigerians, including myself, who are latter-day converts of fuel subsidy removal. It is the least the Tinubu government can do to bring closure to the matter. The big thieves must be made to understand that a king that does not know their Joseph has come. (130  LINES).