The Nation Newspaper

Tag: insensitivity

  • Scourge of insecurity and leadership insensitivity

    Scourge of insecurity and leadership insensitivity

    • By Afolabi Ige

    Nigeria has become a land of anguish, fear and trepidation in the midst of uncommon blessings by God; a land given to pilfering, wastage, mismanagement and misallocation by its elite class.

    Since the advent of modern governance, even under the British colonial masters as a serf of the conquered territory that we were, never has lives been more than this insecure. Insecurity of lives, either due to the scourges of banditry, kidnapping, terrorism or, as collateral damages to anti-terrorism, the response from the state has all together made life return to stone age: brutish, nasty and short.

    Criminality has always been a part of human society no matter how rustic or refined and Nigeria has never been free of crimes and criminalities. Even under the military in the 70s, armed robbery was a star crime. Land grabbing, ritual killings and money rituals have been with us for so long that with development in science and technology particularly ICT, if we are actually progressing as a people, most of them should have become inescapable with in our society by now but not so; rather than abate, it has now graduated to a frenzy in this twilight of the 22nd century Nigeria.

    Kidnapping for ransom has become the most booming criminal enterprise across the length and breadth of Nigeria with no part of the country exempted. Just recently, the serenity and peaceful ambience of Ekiti State was shattered by a twin-tragedy of the murder of two of the royal fathers in the northern axis of the state, while a school bus carrying pupils and teachers was hijacked in the south of the same state almost same time and the occupants of the school bus held hostage in a kidnap for ransom enterprise.

    The state governor, Biodun Abayomi Oyebanji was thrown into profuse exasperation shuttling between Abuja and Ekiti to mobilize for help before the victims of the hijacked school bus could be rescued but not without losing the life of the bus driver before the release of the other occupants a week after their abduction. About the same time in the federal capital city of Abuja, a friend and a neighbour was whisked away from his fortified home in the wee-hour of the night within 30 meters radius of the military checkpoint on Bwari Road and less than 100 meters from the Godwin Abbey Army Cantonment. Until that incident, the cantonment and the check point were considered a fortress but alas, despite heavy shooting by the assailants as they struggled with the man’s fortified doors for close to 30 minutes, help did not come until he was whisked away into the forest before a contingent could arrive at the scene.

    Nigeria was returned to civil rule May 29, 1999, thus in her 25th year of unbroken civil rule. These over 24 years journey has been marred with such security threats as capable of dismantling nations except for Nigeria’s plurality standing as the retaining wall. It started with militancy, destruction of oil facilities and kidnapping of expatriates in the south-south to kidnapping the rich for ransom as criminal business in the southeast, to Boko Haram insurgency which graduated to terrorist regimes hoisting their flag in many local governments in the Northeast before Buhari came in 2015. By this time, Nigeria has started feeling the heat with bomb blasts music roaring in Abuja constantly – the major reasons Nigerians put their hopes in the analogue and rustic Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (Rtd). Buhari with his team moved to the theatre of war in the Northeast and dislodged the terrorists within six months and ensured not an inch of Nigeria soil was still under the jihadists’ flag. Since then, the rest of Nigeria has played victim-host to the dislodged terrorists, manifesting in different shades of criminality as either bandits in the northwest, herdsmen militia in the north-central displacing farmers from their homesteads or kidnappers for ransom as they move to the southwest forests. Today no part of Nigeria is safe particularly from the crime of kidnapping while the government seemed so helpless and an embarrassing failure after near 20 years of engagements against same vices with ear-deafening allocation of our hard earned resources in trillions. Unfortunately, like the Yorubas will say, “instead of the coconut leaf softening down, it is rather hardening the more”.

    Read Also: 400,000 policemen not enough to secure Nigeria – Speaker Abbas

    Talking about Nigeria’s leadership insensitivity, it is appalling that in nearly 15 years since the Boko Haram insurgency, it’s been tales of failure of intelligence, uncoordinated responses, official sabotages, and diversion of arms fund et al. The officers and men at the frontline against the terrorists have been led to desertion serially over delayed or unpaid allowances and lack of weapons for adequate response. The military headquarters has become another NNPC tower of opaqueness with layers upon layers of corruption with our generals notoriously outstanding for pot-belly acquisition. The immediate past Minister of Interior – Rauf Aregbesola, recorded the highest number of jail breaks since independence and yet still spent eight years on the seat. What a country with leadership insensitivity glorified!

    It is most curious that the 36 state governors who are supposed to be chief security officers in their respective states deliberately developed cold feet at amending the constitution to enforce same whereas they are quick to wield their influence to force the federal government to share the excess crude to states rather than building the sovereign wealth fund. These were the same governors who determine almost absolutely the members of National Assembly from their various states and these are the people empowered by the constitution to make laws for the security and good governance of the country. Once I had cause to weep for Nigeria for the greed and insensitivity of its elites as some brazenly decided to buy themselves SUV jeeps costing N160 million for each of the 469 members of the National Assembly. In a sane society, the effect of the dollar parity policy of the Tinubu administration would have been enough caution against such unbridled taste for foreign SUVs at a time the citizens are literally crying blue murder from hunger and sky-rocketing inflation. Again, it took President Tinubu practically begging the governors to “spend the money (subsidy removal accruals) to save the people and not spend the people to service their contract awarding spree for personal benefits and aggrandizement. Unfortunately these are the governors who are supposed to hear the people’s cry more than the president.

    •Ige Esq is a commentator and public policy analyst.

  • Strike: FG’s tardiness, ASUU’s insensitivity

    SIR: The ongoing ASUU strike has again confirmed the perception of bureaucratic laziness in our public service system. It would be recalled that the basis of the current industrial action was the failure of the government to honour the agreement she had with the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) in 2009. It was also the basis for which the union downed tools for about six months in 2013. Although the current administration was not in power when the agreement was made but government is a continuum. Thus failure to quickly resume negotiation with the union at the outset of this administration shows negligence of the bureaucrats in the Ministry of Education and its Labour and Productivity counterpart.

    The bureaucrats in the two ministries and their supervising ministers need be reminded that their primary responsibilities are to every individuals and groups for which those ministries were created to serve.

    More importantly, these strikes are always preceded by warning strikes which is meant to be a reminder. Perhaps if the union had been called to resume negotiation on the implementation of the earlier agreement, the current impasse could have been averted.

    As for ASUU, there is need for a re-examination of strikes as a strategy to compel government attention to their plights as it is becoming increasingly unpopular in view of its paralyzing effects in the academic communities. Again, declaring strike anytime there is grievance on remuneration and calling it off once commitment to pay by the government is obtained while receiving salaries for the period the strike lasted places a huge moral burden on the union especially when the students at the receiving end would never regain the academic time lost to the strike action.

    It is equally worrisome that ASUU only becomes visible when they are aggrieved. Beyond the fact that they comprehensively fail to draw attention to internal maladministration in their individual universities and sundry abuses of academic ethics of their members, they also fail to be counted making important contributions on critical national issues by way of position papers and policy advisories. As a bastion of academic eggheads, they are expected to be seen contributing to governance issues, offering alternative ideas and intellectual guidance particularly on economic matters which in turn affects them as an integral member of Nigeria entity. If the union continually fails in this regard but prefer only to be heard through strikes which would soon outlive its usefulness, the union would no longer be taken seriously other than a crop of academic rebel seeking relevance.

     

    • Muftau B. Tijani,

    University of Lagos.

  • Taraba killings: Ishaku blames FG for insensitivity

    Taraba killings: Ishaku blames FG for insensitivity

    Taraba Governor Darius Ishaku has blamed the federal government for some of the crises in the country, accusing it of not being proactive enough.

    He spoke in Jalingo when the Minister of Interior Gen. Abdulaham Danbazau (rtd) and Deputy Inspector General of Police (DIG) in charge of Operations, Joshak Habila, visited him at the Government House.

    The governor said he complained to the federal government on the regrouping of Boko Haram terrorists in Suntai Daaji forest in Bali local government area over a year ago but nothing was done about it.

    “Government cannot celebrate its victory over Boko Haram until the terrorists regrouping in Taraba are rooted out.

    “The federal government must act fast to avoid a devastating crisis.

    “Some of the crises blamed on herdsmen in actual sense are not carried out by herdsmen but terrorists masquerading as herdsmen.

    “The federal government must be proactive in handling security issues,” he said.

    Ishaku thank the federal government for the prompt attention to the crisis on the Mambilla Plateau.

    He however regretted the same attention was not given to the other eight crises in some local government areas.

     

  • PENGASSAN’s insensitivity

    Coming at the time ordinary Nigerians are going through a period of unprecedented hardship, the ongoing strike by the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN) is one strike too many. It is not only insensitive but inhuman. The absence of oil Petroleum Equalisation Fund workers  to certify all bridging vehicles at depots in Apapa will most likely create more hardship for consumers outside the South-west including Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory where fuel queues were reported to have resurfaced last week. Of course for self-serving PENGASSAN and its members, that development called for nothing but celebration. And that was exactly what its spokesperson, Emmanuel Ojugbana did when he spoke of ‘total compliance with the strike by workers of government agencies such as ‘Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA), Nigeria Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NNRA), Pipelines and Products Marketing Company (PPMC) and the Petroleum Equalisation Fund (PEFMB) headquarters’. He did not forget to add that ‘there was also compliance by PENGASSAN members in NNPC office, Shell, Total, Port Harcourt Refinery Company (PHRC) and Lagos where even those at the jetties and other critical sections where crude are lifted also abandoned their duty posts”.

    It wasn’t as if PENGASSAN and its men have ever been known to fight on the side of the people. Except for the brief period it stood by the people during the resistance against military tyranny following the annulment of MKO Abiola’s victory in 1993, a support greatly influenced by the personality of Kokori, the body has always fought to protect the narrow and selfish interest of its members. As it was in the past when they threatened or actually held the nation to ransom over mundane issues such as ‘non-creation of new jobs, delayed payment of ‘accrued deferred benefits’, discipline of erring branch chairman and casualisation, their current strike is all about PENGASAN and not Nigerians who are today paying for the consequences of massive corruption in the oil sector in which PENGASAN members cannot claim to be bystanders.

    And what are their grievances? They include: ‘Forceful co-option of government agencies in the industry into the Integrated Personnel Payroll Information System (IPPIS), loss of jobs by PENGASSAN members including “key union officers and national officer” due to downsizing by some employers such as Fugro, Universal Energy, Frontier Services and Petrostuff’.  This was followed by some strange demand to be met within seven days. They want government ‘to end anti-labour practices by employers’ at a time millions of Nigeria are without work while a few employed even by government, are owed  areas of salaries running to many months. They also want government to decree industrial harmony between their members and ‘H15, IEME Chevron, Universal Energy, Tecon and Avion Oil and Fugro by prevailing on these companies to reverse recent retrenchments”. And finally they want government to address the problem of ‘funding/cash call arrears, provide feasible guidelines to clear all outstanding payments and evolve a pragmatic system of funding the Joint Venture (JV) operations.”. They knew why government has not met those obligations but by choosing to embark on a strike which will further damage an already prostate economy, they made it clear they are not obliged to be government ally in its battle for economic recovery.

    And I think they are right. The buck stops on the President’s table. That PENGASSAN whose members played pivotal role in the monumental corruption that took place in the oil sector is still in a position to inflict further hardship on Nigerians is the fault of a President who perhaps haunted by his past has chosen vacillation over governance and politics. Under presidentialism, the president and his party are to populate the over 500 small governments that are needed to implement their party manifesto. But after a year of government of change, many of these small governments including those PENGASSAN is now using to inflict further injury on Nigerians are still manned by those who want to continue business as usual.  For instance not a few Nigerians are wondering what we are still doing with equalization fund policy and those who exploited the policy to perpetrate fraud long after the total deregulation of the oil sector.   Before deregulation, Nigerian knew the equalization fund was a fraud. Fuel was never at any time sold at the same rate in Ilesha, Enugu or Sokoto as in Lagos. It was a federal government policy designed not to remove the pains of ordinary people but to empower party loyalists.

    At a time the federal government was paying billions as equalization funds to some influential people where some individuals controlled as many as 500 trucks, some of which were allegedly deployed to smuggle subsidized fuel across the borders, farmers from  onion, beans and yam producing zones of the north transported their farm products to Lagos market without equalization subsidy. Oshogbo traders were in Maiduguri and beyond to procure items while northern traders could be found in the remote parts of the south-east to procure what their customers needed. This was the pattern of trade between Nigerians long before amalgamation and long after independence. Multinationals such as UAC, Cadbury, Liver Brothers, Nigeria breweries etc, have their distribution network for their goods. Equalisation fund in the oil sector was a political elite-inspired policy designed to defraud the people.

    The policy thrust behind the creation of PPPRA was not different. It was set up specifically by those who wanted to recoup their expenses after publicly claiming they sold their private houses to contest the 2003 election. The bill was passed within three months. And as expected,  ‘PPPRA with a staff of 249, supervised by an unwieldy 22 man strong board, earning scandalously whopping salaries and allowance of N57.9billion per annum’, has  served only the interest of those who set it up. In 2011, under Dr.AhmaduAlli as its chairman and Alison-Madueke as supervising minister, the number of fuel importers moved from about half a dozen to 128. In 2011, the body put consumption of fuel by Nigerians at 60.25 million litres. But a House probe which confirmed that PPPRA presided over the theft of N1.7 trillion by PDP stalwarts, their siblings and their fronts in 2011 was to later put the actual 2012 consumption at 39.66 litres.

    As it turned out, the desperate men who created PPPRA in 2003 merely duplicated the functions of Pipelines and Product Marketing Company, (PPMC) set up in 1988 to “profitably and efficiently market refined petroleum products in the domestic as well as export markets, especially in the ECOWAS sub-region, provide marine services and also maintain uninterrupted movement of refined petroleum products from the local refineries.” Even if President Buhari is not aware of the above, the deregulation of the oil market with kerosene selling at between N220 and N300 as against government post regulation fixed price of N83,without a whimper from PPPRA makes the scrapping of the body along with much abused equalization funds and others so recommended by the Oronsaye’s report more imperative.

    One of the reasons Nigeria voted President Buhari was their confidence in his ability to make our refineries work and stop the haemorrhage in the fuel sector. And if PENGASSAN men in Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA), Nigeria Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NNRA), Pipelines and Products Marketing Company (PPMC) and the Petroleum Equalisation Fund (PEFMB) headquarters’ as well as NNPC and Port Harcourt Refinery Company (PHRC), who want business to continue as usual are the reasons he will fail Nigerians, it is time he stops vacillation and got them off his back.

  • APC insensitivity and the rest of us

    The recent outing by Segun Oni, Obasanjo’s surrogate who was removed  by the judiciary after 42 months as governor of Ekiti state, as APC Acting National Chairman, was not only a demonstration of APC’s insensitivity to its supporters but also an assault on the sensibilities of Nigerians that not too long ago, watched in shock as APC allowed David Mark, often regarded as ‘a veteran of coup plotting’, operating according to Ekwerenmadu from inside his sitting room all through the night along with PDP stalwarts, surreptitiously hijacked power, which Nigerians worked so hard to secure. But for the underestimation of the desperation of PDP leaders trying to cover their past by APC leaders, Nigerians never voted for a National Assembly that will spend N300m on toys while over 20 states of the federation are unable to pay a minimum wage of N18, 000, or a senate where 83 elected senators will lock up the senate chambers in solidarity with one of their members who has a case before the Code of Conduct Tribunal.

    Yet APC, at the beginning held so much promise for Nigeria. At its inauguration, this column in a piece titled ‘What Nigerians expect of Buhari and Tinubu’ (Thursday Jan 31, 2013), had said: ‘What Buhari, Tinubu and their colleagues are being called upon to do was not just an inauguration of party to win an election since that job has been made easy by PDP’s self-inflicted damage, but an inauguration of a modernising party to replace the current political parties moulded in the military image, with garrison commanders as party leaders’. What the times called for, the column added ‘are men with eyes on history; men who would emulate the federalists Hamilton and Adams, the Republicans Jefferson and Madison of USA of the 1790s, the British enlightened elite that established parties as modernizing agents after Britain’s reforms of 1832, their French counterparts who did the same after French revolution of 1789 and the Japanese leaders after the Meiji Restoration of 1867’. We can now also add Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev United Russia Party of 2001.

    But sadly, three years down the line, APC leaders are yet to take control of their party. The betrayal of the electorate by APC started immediately after a victory it did not work hard enough to earn.  Buhari and Tinubu, men of great faith trusted men of little faith in their party instead of adhering to the advice of Nicollo Machiavelli, the 16 century Italian diplomat and political theorist, to the Prince, on how to acquire and hold on to power. Before the duo knew what was going on, Atiku Abubakar, Bukola Saraki and Dogara, all PDP men in APC cloak, working hand in gloves with David Mark, APC had been thrown into disarray. The party does not seem to have fully recovered from that initial shock.

    At a time Buhari and Tinubu should have re-established  their control over their party by expelling Saraki,  Dogara and their discredited sponsors, Buhari said the treatment for an eye sore was not eye removal obviously unaware the two eyes had been blinded. That provided an opportunity for Saraki and other PDP men in APC cloak to consolidate their position by substituting the party’s choice of leadership of the two houses with their own choices. They went on to corner as many chairmanship positions of important committees of the two houses as the ruling party. They also went on to spite the ruling party by bending the house rules to accommodate ex-Governor Godswill Akpabio, Saraki’s major backer as minority leader.

    Segun Oni’s emergence as acting chairman of APC, to many observers is indefensible. This is not to say Oni is not eminently qualified for the position. Oni by all means is an illustrious Nigerian. In fact in my criticism of his tenure as governor of Ekiti State, my argument was that by orientation, disposition and my knowledge of him in our ‘Great Ife’ days, he was too refined to be associated with what we today know as PDP 16 years’ legacy. For me, ‘that his attempt to serve his people ended in disaster was due more to the Nigerian factor than personal failings’.  He  was a victim of desperate godfathers such as Obasanjo and Bode George, who imposed him as PDP candidate despite coming third in his party primaries, employed the services of General Olurin, Maurice Iwu and Madam Ayoka to fraudulently proclaim him governor after an electoral defeat and went on to procure the services of pliable judges that secured for him victory after victory at the tribunals until the Appeal court declared his 42 months in government illegal .

    In a piece on this pages dated  December 5, 2010, I had described Oni as a ‘man with a persevering spirit, who  while in office  was not overbearing but had carried himself with dignity even as he fought with stubborn doggedness, the crime of illegitimacy’’. “Of all the South-west governors, forcefully and fraudulently imposed, Oni was simply the best behaved”, the column concluded. But if there are people who consider the a above appraisal is value-laden, Dr Kayode Fayemi, whose mandate was usurped for 42 months has also personally acknowledged Oni as a man who ‘chose honour in spite of opportunity to cut deals with the presidency’ and collect billions to build palaces’ among the squalor of his people like some ex-governors have done.

    But Segun Oni’s personal attributes cannot obviate the reality that he was removed by the judiciary for illegally occupying the governorship seat of Ekiti for 42 months. If APC therefore respects the sensibilities of its supporters and the feeling of decent Nigerians, Oni’s controversial antecedents ought to have precluded him from holding the high office of Deputy National Chairman or acting national chairman of APC, the acclaimed party for change. APC reserves the right to play the ostrich and pretends it does not know Obasanjo hardly sows where he will not reap in ten-folds or that Atiku, his former deputy, and APC stalwart is not a man obsessed only with becoming Nigerian president, but the party has to respect the sensibilities of discerning Nigerians that voted for it because they made a distinction between it and PDP.

    However, in the final analysis, APC must not fail. The consequences of failure are unimaginable. If Buhari and Tinubu therefore wish to be remembered by history, they will have to take control of their party from the garrison commanders and turn it to a modernising agent similar to what obtained in pre-independent Nigeria. With prostrate economy and our children’s abridged future due to self-serving liberalization and privatization policies of the military and its offshoot-PDP, there can be no better time for a modernising party that can confront hooligans who confiscated our national wealth for private use just as Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev have used their United Russia, a party without ideology formed  only in 2001 and controlling only 238 seats of the 450 strong state Duma to turn Russia from candidate for Western Aid to an undisputed world power. The choice is before them.

  • PPPRA’s insensitivity

    The Executive Secretary of the Petroleum Products Price Regulatory Agency, PPPRA, Reginald Stanley says that the agency with a staff strength of 249, supervised by an unwieldy 22-man strong board, earning a scandalously whopping salaries and allowances of N57.9 billion per annum is a blessing to Nigeria. For him the company’s monumental achievement in the last one year as a result of selfless service of the staff and the quality of leadership provided by the minister of petroleum calls for celebration. PPPRA, according to him has become so transparent in the last one year that only unpatriotic elements and enemies of progress will fail to see such self evident achievements. Indeed, for him, if there had been any criticism of PPPRA at all, it could only have been the work of “fifth columnists who are out to spread odium, hatred and campaigns of calumny” because of the body’s “resolve to support the minister of petroleum resources to make the difference’.

    Last week, during a Channel Television programme, he had in a tone soaked with patriotic fervour, declared: “No amount of intimidation or smear campaign can make us to derail in our resolve to serve our fatherland with integrity and honesty of purpose”. He then went on to remind Nigerians that “the minister of petroleum resources has put measures in place that consistently prevented corruption in the downstream sector of the oil industry in recent years”. He did not however tell us if “recent years” covered 2011 when through acts of omission of the minister and Ahmadu Alli, former chairman of PPPRA, a whopping N1.7 trillion was, according to House committee probe report, allegedly stolen by those with close links with PDP and government.

    But nonetheless, he went ahead to reel out what he considered unmatched achievements of PPPRA in the last one year: Bringing sanity to the downstream sector of the oil industry; reducing the level of fuel consumption by Nigerians from 60.25 million in 2011 to 39.66 litres in 2012 and pruning down of the number of fuel importers from unwieldy 128 in 2011, to 39 in 2012″

    He ignored the House Committee report that dismissed the level of consumption claimed by PPPRA as false and the fact that it was the reckless decision of the minister and the then chairman of PPPRA that saw the number of fuel importers moved from less than a dozen to 128 all in effort to spread patronage among PDP members and sympathizers.

    Stanley also wants Nigerians to congratulate PPPRA for reducing the N2.1 trillion the body fraudulently claimed it spent on phantom subsidy in 2011 to less than one trillion in 2012. He pretends as if we don’t have the ongoing court cases arising from National Assembly probe which recommended some leading light of PDP and their siblings for prosecution for allegedly forging documents to claim fuel subsidy when in truth they, to borrow a phrase used by Audu Ogbe, a former PDP chairman, “never imported a bottle of fuel”.

    And finally, in what amounts to an unprovoked assault on our sensibilities, the PPPRA Executive Secretary said we should all celebrate PPPRA and the minister of petroleum for “bringing integrity, creating system, processes and stability in product supply”. How much more can a people take from a group of self-proclaiming patriots who treat all of us as if we are all kindergarten pupils? It is incredible how some government officials who in other climes should be in court defending their integrity freely apply pepper into our eyes, and ask us to laugh instead of crying.

    Beyond puerile attempt by civil servants with no ambition beyond serving political office holders to hood wink us, a closer focus on the emergence of PPPRA itself will show it was like the monetization policy, an ingenious creation of PDP new breed politicians designed to confiscate our common wealth. In other words, policy formulation and policy implementation have become instruments of corruption to further impoverish our people.

    By strange coincidence, PDP assumption of power in 1999 was greeted with long queues at the filling stations, a development not brought about by market forces of demand and supply but mainly due to manipulation of the market to create artificial scarcity. Cynics say it was a strategy by cash-strapped PDP’s newly elected politicians to recoup their investments following their public confession that they sold private properties to fight the 1999 election.

    As parts of achieving this objective, contracts for the refurbishment of the refineries were awarded to politicians instead of multinationals that built them. The refurbishment exercise failed as was planned.

    As if working to answer, President Olusegun Obasanjo set up the Petroleum Products Pricing Committee which in turn recommended PPPRA with a mandate to “liberalise the downstream sector of the petroleum industry, privatise the refineries, deregulate and liberalise the imports of petroleum products and, generally, make the products available at reasonable prices”. The Bill for the establishment of PPPRA was promptly passed into law in February 2003 and assented to by Obasanjo in May 2003 because PDP had vested interest. (PIB has been pending for over five years}

    But PPPRA’s assigned functions turned out to be mere duplications of functions of Pipelines and Product Marketing Company, (PPMC) which was set up in 1988 to “profitably and efficiently market refined petroleum products in the domestic as well as export markets, especially in the ECOWAS sub-region, provide marine services and also maintain uninterrupted movement of refined petroleum products from the local refineries.”

    For those behind PPPRA, the end justifies the means. Not even the existence of the NNPC Act 1977 which saddled the minister of petroleum with the responsibilities of “regulating and fixing petroleum product prices and supervising the MPR/DPR that has sole regulatory authority over technical standards, refining, and logistics in the sector”, was going to stop them.

    Today, 10 years down the line, PPPRA has served only the interest of those who set it up. The lot of the poor is worse today than it was 10 years ago. They still cannot afford the cost of cooking gas while the so-called subsidized kerosene sells for about N140 naira outside NNPC filling stations.

    It has also turned out that the argument of both Sanusi Lamido, the CBN governor and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Minister of Finance, that it was only the middle class owners of two cars and diesel engine generators who were beneficiaries of government’s so-called subsidy has been proved to be more political than economic. As a result of their false prognosis, many industries that depend on diesel to run their factories have all folded up. Those managing to survive cannot compete with fake and substandard goods flooding the market due to import licenses selectively allocated to party members. It was on account of this Dangote Cement temporarily suspended production not too long ago.

    Unlike, PPMC, PPPRA has shown more commitments to importation of refined petroleum products than making our own refineries work. Instead of using NNPC facilities or rehabilitating the over 4,000 kilometres of petroleum pipeline commissioned by Obasanjo in 1979, PPPRA depends on the storage facilities of members of Depot Petroleum Products Marketers Association (DAPPMA) (Obat Petroleum is reputed to have the largest and most modern storage facilities in the world). It also patronises Independent Marketers Company (NIPCO) that has invested billions in storage facilities and a jetty in Apapa. It also relies to some degree on the services of Oando and Zenon petroleum companies that jointly control over 200 trucks and a jetty owned by Zenon.

    We now know without consulting the duo of Sanusi and Okonojo-Iweala, that a government that expends so much of our resources through PPPRA to patronize parasites instead of buildings refineries serves not our interest but those of the parasites.

    PPPRA that guzzles N57.9 billion every year serves only the interest of those who set it up to recoup money spent on election. With N600 billion, we will probably build two medium refineries that will end our dependency on imported fuel and provide job for a few of our 29 million unemployed youth. Of course, it will force current beneficiaries of the so-called deregulation presently falling over each other to erect the largest storage facility in the world and rent to government that can neither manage existing refineries nor NNPC tank farms, to stop feeding on our blood.

  • Group laments govt’s insensitivity

    Group laments govt’s insensitivity

    The Colleges of Education Academic Staff Union (COEASU) has vowed to mobilise market women, artisans and other stakeholders against the federal and state governments.

    COEASU President, Asagha Nkoro told newsmen at a briefing in Abuja that the Federal Government had continued to exhibit uncaring attitude to the plight of lecturers by failing to implement negotiated agreement.

    The union listed the refusal to commence renegotiation process as contained in the 2010 agreement, none conduct of Needs Assessment, imposition of IPPIS, proliferation of satellite campuses, exploitative tax regime and the refusal to release White Paper of the visitation panel as contending issues government must resolve.

    Lamenting that the Federal Government had not responded to issues raised by the union since it embarked upon the strike on April 29, Nkoro, who was with the General Secretary, Nuhu Ogirima, also accused some state governments of abandoning their fundamental responsibilities in states-owned Colleges of Education.

    According to him, the refusal of governments to pay attention to the union was an indication of lack of respect for the masses who struggled for their children to attend colleges of education because they could not afford university education.

    Nkoro said: “It is quite incontrovertible that the refusal of the respective governments and various authorities to expeditiously address the issues could induce the union to invoke measures that would impede/paralyse the smooth running of the entire colleges of education system.

    “Ultimately, the peaceful and congenial atmosphere for which the colleges of education have been known would be difficult to guarantee, should the situation persist with the manifest impunity on the part of the government and the colleges’ management and councils,” he added.

    According to the union, the consistent manifestation of gross discrimination in addressing matters of common interest in tertiary institutions was not in the best interest of the sector.

    Nkoro also blamed some governors for not complying with the 65 years retirement age and contributory pension scheme, underfunding and infrastructural decay among others; especially in Osun State Colleges of Education in Ilesa and Ila-Orangun; and FCT College of Education, Zuba.