By Kassim Afegbua
Dangote, a well known plutocrat was in the news again last week, when he raised an alarm over the unholy activities of the International Oil Companies-IOCs, who according to him, are trying to frustrate the take off of his crude refining company.
Since after the fire outbreak at his refinery which was put out, speaking corporeally, Aliko Dangote has remained on fire: visibly troubled, the man is trying to find stability for his refinery so that Nigeria, Africa and the global business environment can enjoy its utility value. Aliko Dangote is not garrulous and would not hug the mic at a birthday party; he is tight lipped with a debonair deportment. and he focuses on his business. Sadly, this hitherto taciturn nabob is wailing to the public, like a mother whose baby has been snatched in the rain, by a masked man. He had to cry out first, on the 30% inflation rate announced by the Apex Bank, the CBN; a rate that has now climbed the roof top of 34.19% this week. According to Dangote, it will be extremely difficult for business owners and manufacturers to operate successfully under such a high inflation rate. But that is what it is; Nigeria’s present economic gloomy outlook may not abate immediately, as a conflation of measures are being put in place by the Tinubu-led Federal Government; these measures are not magical, but we are told they are promising. Too many unanswered questions.
Dangote says he is having difficulty accessing crude oil from Nigeria. This can become the bane of the functioning of his refinery. The continued functioning of the refinery itself is threatened by the non-availability of raw materials. This is another source of worry for Aliko Dangote, knowing how much he has sunk into the refinery and the kind of unpaid loans that now need to be serviced. If the refinery doesn’t have the raw materials to operate, the entire structure can be brought to a halt. At the moment, he has had to extend his catchment to foreign countries to be able to achieve the 650,000 barrels capacity of the refinery which was projected. If this trend continues, the ability to meet up with expectations of the refinery will be impaired potentially carrying with it a concatenation of setbacks and outright losses which would become an extremely sad reality. With the kind of equipment he has in there, even downtime is a threat. Only last week, Dangote told a befuddled nation that the stakes of NNPC Limited in the refinery has come down to 7.2% percent as a consequence of their failure to balance payment for their share that was due in June, 2024. Before now, we were told that the NNPC had 20% stake in the refinery, but the revelation by Dangote introduced fresh dynamics to the entire involvement of the NNPC Limited. The 20% stake was reportedly acquired for $2.76b by NNPC, but knowing that the stake has been reduced to 7.2% for failure to redeem its commitment to the refinery raises one’s curiosity. Too many unanswered questions.
At the official commissioning of the refinery, the then CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele told an ecstatic eclectic gathering, that Dangote was already defraying part of its loans obligations even when the refinery had not commenced production. Emefiele gave a roadmap for robust opportunities which the business concern represents towards driving the growth of the Nigerian economy. The initial take off date lapsed due to technical glitches, but after then, nothing daunt and all set to commence, there was no crude supply to the refinery for refining. Asked what could be the rationale for non-supply of crude oil to the refinery, industry players and government operators blamed the crude oil theft. Is this a mockery of someone’s good intentions? This means that the nation is losing potential revenue as well as potential savings, and part of the shortfall has adversely affected Dangote Refinery. This injury to our own foot means that the villains are ready and willing to watch that whole investment go into disuse. This is so sad. In their questioning song, the Black eye peas asked, “where the love?” We have consistently clamoured for local refineries- new and or renovating existing ones; but see the situation today. It is this obfuscation, equivocation, and esoteric character of the powers that be that is the bane of our economy. So, if the Port Harcourt refinery had been fixed in what they called Turn Around Maintenance–TAM– will it too suffer Dangote’s fate? Or does this mean that Dangote only has a ghost of a chance of succeeding in the face of the protracted Nigerian maladies: corruption, favouritism, foul play, double standard and deliberate sabotage to put the country on permanent languor, because someone does not like the face of the someone. Too many unanswered questions.
Section 109 of the Petroleum Industry Act introduced the Domestic Crude Supply Obligation to Nigeria’s Oil Industry in order to guarantee that local refineries get the crude allocation without being strangled. That provision makes it obligatory on the part of NNPC Limited to comply and feed the refineries with the needed crude for refining. But on hearing the alarm bells which Dangote himself raised, it is obvious that the devil is in the details. While Nigerians were prematurely jubilant over the completion of the Dangote Refinery expecting the opening of the doors for a more robust competitive Petroleum pricing at the local level, the frustration of Aliko Dangote has unfortunately further deepened the distrust and nihilism in the system. Do we truly desire to help our country to grow, or are we all are living in fools paradise for selfish reasons? Why must we frustrate a man who has invested so much back home to solve multifarious societal challenges under the pretext of crude oil theft when a company, Tantita Security, is earning huge income to guarantee safety on Nigeria’s waterways and to prevent crude oil theft. Who is fooling who? Our present crude oil production per day is said to be about 1.2million barrels, which does not meet our OPEC quota. What then is the use of Tantita Security if after two years, no remarkable improvement has been recorded in this area? Crude oil is not a loaf of bread that could be squeezed into anybody’s pocket and taken away; It requires the conspiracy of several actors, at home and abroad to bundle crude into vessels outside the shores of Nigeria. Do the bunkerers see Dangote’s investment as threat to their means of livelihood? Too many unanswered questions.
Aliko Dangote surely needs help from the Federal Government and other stakeholders. Government, as it were, has no business in business, but has a duty to protect and encourage its local businesses. With a 650,000 barrels a day functional refining capacity of the Dangote Refinery, by now Nigerians ought to be enjoying some slack, away from the tense living they came face to face with within the last year. Dangote declared weekend that his passion for the country was the reason for building such a gigantic refinery and that his major investments are domiciled here in Nigeria and nowhere else . His sense of patriotism is not in doubt but like every other monopoly, he needs government protection to survive the sharks in the oil and gas sector. His initial fears about the IOCs is beginning to manifest especially as he has continued to be starved of the crude he desperately needs, to put the refinery to work. This irony is a national embarrassment. How can a man have a refinery in an oil producing country and is importing crude from another country? How does that sound? I know quite well that President Tinubu is in a hurry to make an impact on the economy, and I will plead that he takes more than a passing interest in seeing that this investment does not fail. The impact on the economy, when fully operational, will be in leaps and bounds. Whatever that is left to be done to make Dangote Refinery work optimally, and even transcendently should be extended to him to save the country another roundtripping sinecure that does no one any good. Or is there more to this whole epic. Too many unanswered questions
The Tantita Security that was given the contract to secure the waterways should step up their activities to put paid to incidents of crude oil theft, so that we are not forced to ponder the question of Mathew 12 in the Bible. I think I am now old enough to admonish Nigeria: it is high time we brought all this nonsense to an end. With all the schemes and high handedness with which we have carried on since 1960, can we say that we have won? Whether as individuals or as a nation? Let us do away with this myopia and other maladies that bedevil us and build a better Nigeria for us and for our posterity. It is high time we made a U turn. When the youths are restive, aberrant and outrightly errant, we appear bemused. Why?? Is it not consequential? Too many unanswered questions.
Afegbua, former Commissioner for Information in Edo state writes from Abuja
