There are understandably, a tribe out there who believe that, next to the tribe of politicians, Nigeria’s problems begins and ends with the national oil corporation the NNPC, whether in the shape of the defunct Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) or its mutation, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL). Were the metrics of trust deficit to be put on the Richter scale, its measure, not without reasons, will most certainly tend to the highest point on the seismic wave. An instance of the messenger being the message; such is the ignoble perception of an entity whose mandates cut through the core of our existence – one that has suffered such extensive historical distortions to the point of having its rationale obliterated – that few Nigerians are prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt not to talk of giving it a sympathetic hearing no matter the issues involved.
While the transition from NNPC to NNPCL may have been pragmatic, I sometimes wonder the world of difference it would have made had the company chosen a completely different name and brand strategy. Truth is, many Nigerians that have long given up on the erstwhile inept outfit that could neither fix its refineries nor its vast pipelines network; and so they must have wondered – Petroleum Industry Act or not – if that same old leopard suddenly adorned in the fancy garb of an assumed new beginning could be trusted to shed its colours by mere substitution, without a complete remake of its processes.
Surely, while the issues of gross mismanagement of the refineries and its management of fuel prices continue to endure, Nigerians ought to be forgiven for treating the NNPC and the NNPCL as one and the same despite the strident clarification about its transitioning. To the extent that the NNPCL itself has not helped matters when, rather than act the true player that it is supposed to be, it either opts to play the megaphone of the government when it suits it or venture into the delicate terrain of regulation hence the confusion that current pervades across the industry today. A part of the joke of the muddled role it has found itself as captured in a widely circulating cartoon read: ‘Someone can leave his four wives and be chasing a side-chic? This is the story of NNPCL that abandoned its four refineries to be a distributor of Dangote Refinery’.
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That of course is an oversimplification of the NNPCL/Dangote Refinery story. The real story, more nuanced, is certainly more complex. The story, to put it simply, is borne of the intriguing dynamics of the market situation, part of the necessary rites of transition in which the entity, as the exigency foremost player and state-owned entity, is expected to play the lead.
No doubt, if the issues were simply about winning the argument, the NNPCL will obviously stand no chance with Nigerians. In the first place, it is doubtful if anyone believes the arithmetic of pricing. Equally, its assumption of an off-taker in what was supposed a market governed by its own dynamics could only have been held suspect by those Nigerians who had long made up their minds that nothing good could come out of the company.
What of its claims that the reason Nigerians can’t have enough petrol to go round is because the local cost of petrol being cheaper comparatively to those of its neighbours creates an irresistible incentive for smuggling?
Also, Nigerians heard the forth and back argument not just about the price the NNPCL supposedly bought the product from Dangote Refinery, but the actual quantity supplied to the market. The impression here was that the local refinery’s price is far cheaper than those imported with suggestions in the febrile social media that the Dangote Refinery was ready actually offering to supply the NNPCL at about N600 per litre and that the new refinery had enough capacity to flood the market with petrol.
By the way, does it matter now that those long-held myths have now been shattered by the event of the past week? I refer here to the announcement of the company’s exit from the self-appointed off-taker role for Dangote Refinery petrol. Going by the announcement, every player can go to the Dangote Refinery’s gantry for a fill to their heart’s content subject to cash availability.
Yet, hard as it might seem to accept that the NNPCL in some respects would appear the more sinned against than the sinning in all of these, the truth is that the company’s underlying message of reforms, its positions, sometimes confused and confusing, are difficult to fault. Of course, we might agree that the company has a long way to clean its image as an opaque, corrupt, inefficient and unaccountable entity; the real enemy would appear the long sustained expectations by Nigerians that the company would always exist over and above what the market dynamics dictate.
The entrance of Dangote Refinery has certainly changed all of that. Unfortunately, petrol price, rather than come down has gone a notch up. A part of that new reality is the restiveness occasioned by the hike which although Nigerians may have found intolerable, is nonetheless inexorable in the current circumstances.
Which takes us to my earlier piece with the title Petrol: It’s the math, stupid! The argument is that those making the NNPCL the issue miss the point; the real issue is the cost of petrol at the pump and how to ensure supply sustainability. Again, the point was made: while its benefits are manifold and perhaps transformational, the old assumptions about local refineries being the elixir to the subsidy conundrum has been hopelessly exaggerated. More than that, the era of treating the cost issue as a minor element in the fuel price template would seem gone for good. Much as Nigerians would rather finger the NNPC(L) as the main culprit in the national debacle, the entity would seem culpable only to the extent of Nigerians’ self-indulgence. While the dawn of the PIA may have sought to cure Nigerians of this malaise, the other reality of a crippling $6 billion debt on the neck of NNPCL leaves it with nary a choice on the matter. That is simply the way it is! What Nigerians need at this time is patience and understanding.