Nigeria’s contaminated fuel and adulterated leadership

Timipre Sylva and General Muhammadu Buhari are two of a kind in content and character. They are the typical monozygotic twins. They share so many things in common. Both were once governors at two different times and dispensations. They both have a congenital affiliation with the nation’s oil industry. Sylva comes from the region which produces the nation’s oil. Buhari, on his part, hails from the region which, though does not produce a drop of oil, controls the nation’s oil sector. Buhari was once a Minister of Petroleum. During that inglorious era, his enemies alleged that a huge sum of our patrimony, derived from the sales of our oil, developed wings and flew away. The issue of $2 billion oil money remains indelible till date. At another time, Buhari found his way to the helm of affairs to manage our oil resources as the chairman of the Petroleum Trust Fund, PTF. That was during the era of the expired dark goggled Head of State, Sani Abacha. From Hades, Abacha is still sending us windfall from the loot from petrol dollars. Why this analogy? It is to show that the recent contaminated fuel the Buhari and Sylva NNPC imported or approved to be imported to Nigeria is not by accident. Some people, as a multibillionaire once described, “are born with the opposite of the Midas touch”. Anything they touch dies or fails to prosper.

Today is February 15, 2020. It is exactly twenty five days after the Nigerian National Petroleum Company, NNPC, Limited discovered that some smart alecs in the nation’s oil industry imported contaminated fuel into the country. Almost a month after the discovery, the best response so far from the Federal Government is the “tough” talk by General Muhammadu Buhari, the President and Commander-in-Chief, that the importers of the bad fuel must face the full wrath of the law. Even that talk is a foul talk on its own. If anybody should make such a call, it should not be General Buhari, who happens to be the number one culprit in the whole shenanigan. Buhari is not just the president; he is also the Minister of Petroleum. His younger sibling, the Junior Minister in the ministry, Timipre Sylva, added salt to the injury of the contaminated fuel. On Wednesday last week, after the usual hollow ritual known as the Federal Executive Council, FEC, meeting, he announced that the government had begun the process of probing the contaminated fuel imports. Pity!

How else do we explain that NNPC discovered that some companies, including its own subsidiary, Duke Oil,  imported contaminated fuel into the country on January 20, 2022, and by February 15, 2022, we are still talking about a probe? How do we convince the comity of sane nations that Nigeria is not suffering from adulterated leadership, when our Minister of Petroleum is also the president of the country, and 25 days after we discovered that some individuals played a prank  on our collective sensibility, the best we have gotten from the president is an ineffectual threat that the importers must face the music! How impractical can this leadership be! Who should first face the music if not the supervisory ministers and the management of the approving agency, the NNPC? What are we as a people?

Let us start with the idea of importation of fuel in the first instance. How did Nigeria get to the level that it has to go to Belgium to import fuel? We are talking about fuel and not the used motor spare parts the mechanics call “Belgium” and convince us all that they are better than new spare parts. What but adulterated leadership will lead a nation that is number six in the OPEC hierarchy to go to Belgium to buy fuel? If we are normal as a nation, and we have sound leadership at the helms of affairs, should we be selling our crude oil at cheaper prices to other nations only for us to go back to those nations to buy the finished products at cut-throat prices, such that we spend billions of Naira to augment the cost prices in the name of the fraud, tagged, “subsidy”. Why would Belgium and any other country for that matter not  mix “ogogoro”, Methanol, with the fuel it is selling to us, having realised that our president and Minister of Petroleum’s nostrils are blocked by crass ineptitude to perceive such offensive odour (pure corruption); and, or, if he perceives it, will be too ataraxia to bother about what happens to the end users? Do we blame Belgium, which saw the footprints of a mad man and used the same for money making ritual, when it is aware that no other oil-producing nation will ever come to buy finished oil products from it?

Reading the explanation by Mallam Mele Kyari, NNPC’s Chief Executive Officer/Group Managing Director, on how the bad product got into our dispensing machines, I wondered if we are so damned as a people. According to him, the cargoes’ quality certificates issued at load port (Antwerp-Belgium) by AmSpec Belgium indicated that the gasoline complied with Nigerian specification. “NNPC quality inspectors, including GMO, SGS, GeoChem and G&G conducted tests before discharge and also showed that the gasoline met Nigerian specification. It is important to note that the usual quality inspection protocol employed in both the load port in Belgium and our discharge ports in Nigeria do not include the test for Percent methanol content and therefore the additive was not detected by our quality inspectors’’, Kyari told us bunkum! Where are the lethargic inspectors? Has anyone of them been sanctioned yet? Who has been placed on interdiction since the error was discovered? Why should Kyari himself still be in office as NNPC GMD, after that fatal error? If, and I am not sure it will ever happen, the so-called “probe” identifies some culprits, Kyari will be the one to sign their letters of sack or sanction? Why are we like this?

If by now we don’t have a single individual who has been punished for the great disservice to the nation by the approval of the contaminated fuel, how are we sure that any of the almighty oil players: MRS, Emadeb/Hyde/AY Maikifi/Brittania-U Consortium; Oando  and Duke Oil, named by Kyari as the importers of the contaminated fuel, will ever be sanctioned? What has happened to the report of the oil subsidy scam probe championed by the House of Representatives ‘Integrity Group” years ago? Will this not go the same way?

At the risk of sounding cynical, I say, without hesitation, that I don’t have any iota of hope that Buhari will ever make anybody involved in the contaminated fuel scandal face the music. The administration, going by its antecedents, does not have the instrument to produce the percussion that will produce the music in the first instance. A government that has spent almost seven years wasting the goodwill the people invested in it cannot be trusted to make any meaningful impact at this stage of its tenure. One of the ‘bojuboju’ promises of the Buhari campaign in 2015 is the issue of our refineries. Nothing has happened in that sector. The Mai Gaskiya told us that the subsidy was a scam and would be abolished. Today, he pays far more than the administration he and his promoters labelled “corrupt and clueless”. Which promise did Buhari make that he has not breached?

So, when Garba Shehu, Buhari’s Senior Special Assistant, Media and Publicity, said that his principal had vowed that the suppliers of the contaminated fuel would be made to face the law, I laughed. It is either Shehu does not really understand his principal or, he does not know that in the avian business, a fowl does not eat the intestine of another fowl. Buhari will never make himself face the music. Sylva will not be brought before the law. And Kyari will never be punished for superintending over an agency whose chemists cannot even smell ‘ogogoro’! If the Minister of Petroleum, the Junior Minister of Petroleum and the CEO/GMD of the NNPC were men of character and worth, their first reaction would be resignation. If they had done that, there  would have been no need for the president to direct “the relevant government agencies to take every step in line with the laws of the country to ensure the respect and protection of consumers against market abuses and social injustices”. The president himself is the first “market abuser” and perpetrator of “social injustice in this matter; his younger siblings are Sylva and Kyari and the rest of the NNPC chemists and the importers are his distant cousins. A president that is alive to his responsibility would never allow a man like Sylva to stay in office for the next second, the moment his foul emission: “Nobody has, before now, checked for methanol in our fuel, it’s not very usual and this is the first time this is happening”, hit the news stand.

This is why I find it difficult to believe that Buhari meant it when Shehu quoted him as saying: “dissatisfied consumers are entitled to a proper redress of their complaints”. Where is the database to ascertain the number of people affected? Do we have the capacity to assess the volume of damage done to individual cars? What about those who bought the bad fuel for use at home in their generators; the vulcanizers by the road sides, the guys running barbers’ shops? That part of the statement remains mere rhetoric. It is not that the idea is unrealistic and undoable; it equally opens another door for corruption that will make oil subsidy green with envy. A nation that does not have the simplest of data concerning the accurate number of its citizens should not be talking about “redress” or compensation for wronged citizens, especially in a case like this. Nigeria cannot afford another round of “tradermoni” in the name of redress for contaminated fuel. We have all been contaminated enough by the adulterated leadership that fate foisted on us. For once, the government should allow us to nurse our injury, undisturbed!