( THE NATION MONDAY, JANUARY 25, 2010).
Good. But government must honour its promise to tackle the problems first
After putting Nigerians through the month- long agony of its deregulation induced fuel scarcity, the federal government finally admitted last week that the environment was not ripe for the programme.
At a parley with downstream petroleum sector operators, petroleum resources minister, Rilwanu Lukman was quoted to have said that the policy will remain on hold until the government fixed bot5h the refineries and associated infrastructural challenges facing the sector.
He was also reported as admitting that the enabling conditions for the establishment of new refineries do not as yet exist. He reportedly gave out government‘s analysis of the challenge as the absence of “necessary incentives to make investors put their money on the refineries”.
And then his panacea: the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) now lying at the National Assembly.
With due respect to the minister, it is either the government has pretended to be deaf all along, or it chose to be impervious to reason, giving the informed opinion that have been canvassed on the matter by several interest groups.
Does this not boiled down to the same thing that the various groups have been saying all along – that you do index deregulation with importation; and moreover, that you do not deregulate without creating the enabling conditions for meaningful and unfettered competition?
This volte face can only be a tacit acceptance that the orchestrated fuel scarcity, designed to blackmail Nigerians to accept the inevitability of the one sided – import – driven deregulation has failed to persuade.
And to imagine the cost of government’s obduracy in the zillions of man-hours wasted on fuel queues and its crippling effects on productivity generally.
The minister’s admission however raises several posers: why the force in the first place, when the government had not ventured into the rigour of its workability –more so as it had done practically nothing to isolate and deal with the problems plaguing the sector.
Why throw the economy into a spasm? Is it to create the psychological atmosphere for breaking the resistance of the people? Why plod on with the programme when the institutional environment is palpably inadequate and the legal instruments far from being in place? And why subject citizens to avoidable pains just to register the point that the programme is the cure-all for the problem of the downstream petroleum industry?
Clearly, if the officials of government had been less blinded by their conceit and inscrutable arrogance, they ought to have appreciated the rigour of thought and planning that the programme requires.
The choice to be made is hardly between abdication, which they prefer, and the free fall regime of petroleum product pricing, which they rather deny – whose merit consists solely in saving the government the trouble of paying some so-called hefty subsidy payouts.
Nigerians are clearly not as half informed about the potential gains of deregulation as the officials who would rather trade the well-being of the people for the short-term gains of vested interest – particularly those of the cartel of fuel importers.
Now that government has admitted that the scales have fallen from its eyes, what Nigerians expect it to do is move swiftly to address the specific problems that it has identified. This involve not only fixed the extensive pipeline infrastructure but overhauling the entire gamut of fuel distribution chain.
The passage of the PIB, no doubt, is another priority. But then, its passage must be seen as only a part of the overall measure to bring sanity, efficiency and delivering value to Nigerians. In plain terms, it should combine the aim of getting multiplicity of players on board with the goal of domesticating substantial aspects of downstream operation. This, in our view, is the surest path to spin off maximum benefits in backward integration for the economy.