For the benefit of Ibe Kachikwu and other ministers who do not know how their cars and generators are fuelled, let me relive my experience in the filling stations between Thursday and Sunday last week. I had missed Dr. Kachikwu Wednesday’s ‘I am not a magician capable of conjuring the availability of fuel’ because I left Lagos early to attend the inaugural lecture of a colleague at Babcock University.
On Thursday morning, I opted to return home and work from my library after almost three hours of fruitless effort to join Lagos-Ibadan express road through Otedola estate gate as a result of traffic gridlock created by those engaged in panic buying of petrol and possible sabotage by independent oil marketers trying to exploit Kachikwu’s gaffe.
But the option of working from home was aborted by lack of electricity. I then chose to walk across to a nearby filling station with a 10 litre keg. What I ran into was a fierce battle between motorists, hundreds of men and women with kegs and others with their generators. Disappointed, I returned home opting to sit in front of the house since staying inside was not a choice because of the heat. My experience on Friday and Saturday was not different except that on Saturday, some gun-wielding policemen had joined the desperate crowd.
Initially I thought they were drafted down to provide order but it turned out they were also in search of fuel for their patrol vehicles. Relief finally came for me on my way from Mass on Easter Sunday. I got fuel into the car after about two hours on the queue but the station manager insisted he had an order not to sell into kegs. We moved to the next filling station where a young nursing mother I later discovered was a reporter with Radio Nigeria fought her way through the crowd to drag the station manager down from his office. She got 20 litres for herself and 10 litres for her senior professional colleague.
As we moved to where we parked our cars, a young woman with about four months old baby pleaded with the Radio Nigeria reporter that she also be introduced to the station manager who had by then escaped from the surging crowd. But sighting the reporter’s baby in the car, she reached for her bag of wits and said all she wanted as dowry for her cute baby girl was 10 litres of fuel. The two nursing mothers were still engaged in serious haggling as I drove off. This sobering experience exemplifies what ordinary Nigerians are going through all over the country where pump price of a litre of oil is reported to range between N150 and N170. Whereas before what Bola Tinubu described as Kachikwu’s flippancy and as arrogance by some others, it took less than an hour to fuel your car at petrol filing stations and with a tip of about N200, your jerry can be filled up.
But it is now pure academic whether Kachikwu’s indiscretion fuelled the current panic buying by desperate Nigerians or created an atmosphere for sabotage by independent marketers who had publicly claimed government foreign exchange policy which limited the share of their members importation to 20% compared to NNPC’s 80% would not provide succour for Nigerians since their members control all the storage facilities needed by NNPC. The buck stops at the table of President Buhari who appointed Kachikwu who the APC National Vice Chairman, South-south, Prince Hilliard Eta claimed “ ‘has not entirely cast off the orientation of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP where he was”, and, who the Trade Union Congress’ (TUC) has advised to resign honourably. It is on record that Kachikwu, since his appointment, has made a number of controversial pronouncements that were out of tune with APC policy statements.
It is however a strange coincidence Kachikwu’s greatest supporters in his current travails are the likes of Chief Ebenezer Babatope, PDP BOT member, and Niger Delta Indigenous Movement For Radical Change, NDIMRC as well as NNPC which claims to be ‘working with Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria (IPMAN), oil majors and over 1,000 NNPC staff, nationwide to ensure we overcome the obstacles in the distribution of the petroleum products’.
But what is not in doubt is that Kachukwu, who like Okonjo-Iweala, is a creation of the media which often erroneously believe success in the private sector will necessarily translate to success in government. But such comparison can be odious. In the World Bank as in Kachikwu’s oil multinational company, decisions are collegiate.
Matters are not helped by the fact that those the media oversell often become arrogant. Okonjo-Iweala, a creation of the media, who was said never to have read economics as a first degree insisted on earning salary denominated in dollars before accepting Obasanjo’s ministerial appointment as minister of finance. She resigned when she was deployed to another ministry. And it will be recalled how she arrogantly talked down on protesters of fuel subsidy removal informing the uninformed Nigerians why government owed it a duty to pay those who spent their money to supply fuel to government.
It turned out she was paying those who allegedly forged papers to collect about N1.6 trillion from government. The story with import waivers was not different. Under the watch of Okonjo-Iweala, who with the media never did wrong as minister of finance and coordinating minister of the economy, the CBN was turned to an ATM machine by President Jonathan and the office of the National Security Adviser became a piggy bank for PDP dealers and wheelers. President Buhari however now has an opportunity to prevent the emergence of another arrogant media created Okonjo-Iweala who thinks Nigeria owes him gratitude for agreeing to serve.
As for the independent marketers who were in disarray after Buhari’s election but now insist government policies cannot work without them, I have searched without finding their contributions to the economy.
They collect our scarce foreign exchange to import fuel at a mark-up price; the Nigerian taxpayers foot the cost of demurrage in case of unexpected problems in the ports. And when government delays payment, taxpayers are called upon to defray interests they incurred in their banks. In the circumstances, one does not need to be a World Bank expert to know that those who fry and package plantain chips and their counterparts in the pure water business contribute more to the economy than those who have become a leach on the economy.
Nigerian miracle seekers voted Buhari because they wanted him to perform magic. This is not an impossible task because modern human management itself is a science governed by the same scientific laws which many consider as magic. Buhari therefore doesn’t need to be reminded by the Trade union Congress (TUC) that those who claim not to be ‘magicians capable of conjuring availability of fuel’ cannot help him fulfil the aspirations of miracle seekers that voted him into power.
