Nigeria is a typical underdeveloped oil producing nation and one of the largest oil producing nations in the world. Its leaders often gloat in the self delusion of a developing country but in reality, it is bedeviled by myriad of challenges that constitute indices of underdevelopment.Most often, these challenges are artificially created by the wickedness of its ruling elite and in few cases through natural causes but sustained by the ineptitude, parochial nature and shallowness of its leadership's intelligent quotient. Among this myriad of problems however, none has recurred more perennially and with such anguish, tears and hardship visited on the population than the problem of petroleum products' pump price management.Crude oil which is the raw material for these products is one of God's abundant blessings to Nigeria both in terms of quality and quantity of its deposit on her soil. Not less than 75 percent of Nigeria's gross earning is realised from oil while the product alone accounts for about 95 percent of her foreign exchange earning particularly from the 1970s till date. Of a fact, Nigeria, through its one-time Head of State once declared to the whole world in a frenzy of ignorance that money, the all-time international scarce, means was not Nigeria's problem but the wise application of it. If you like, you can join me to call that an open invitation to official corruption and waste by the numero-uno of the ruling military elite as it was then. That government even went ahead to declare the 'Udoji award', a needless and unsolicited 100 percent salary increment to every civil servant in 1973 thus opening our system to affluence without sweat, opening the floodgate to white ' collar jobs search and permanently altering the rural-urban population template. Nigeria also became a prey of the industrialised predating West. Everybody has since continued to see Nigeria and its oil as a good prey and God bless you if you ever had an opportunity to kiss the oil pipe anywhere, anyhow. Cheap oil money obfuscates our noble dreams as a country with all of us becoming docile and our leaders becoming ipretenders. We were having almost everything except development and we were sleep-walking down our path to perdition.Our agricultural sector which hitherto enjoyed pride of place in foreign exchange earnings, gross domestic product and employment generation before the advent of crude oil rather than being made to benefit from the oil boom, so that it can continue to create employment for the surging population, was relegated to the background and eventually ignored. We all became white collar job seekers and contractors under the military and now under the civil rule, every Nigerian is an oil money predating politician. The healthy economic competitive spirit among the regions was totally deflated and in place, a 'street beggar' economy was popularised where governors rather than contribute to the national economy only come to share monthly allocations at the centre. By and large, accountability becomes a thing of the books. Governors become 'lords of the manor' over their territories dishing out contracts and patronages which breed envy, jealousy, rancor, indiscipline, poor productivity and ineptitude in the hallowed chambers of public administration. That has been the effect of oil on Nigeria.Now to the petroleum products pricing palava which is the thrust of this write-up; Petroleum is still a major source of energy globally which makes the product to command high price internationally with end-products which include but not limited to Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) and diesel for running vehicles and industrial engines, kerosene (A.G.O) for domestic and household uses, aviation fuel for flight operator,s liquefied natural gas for both power generation to boost power supply and domestic and industrial cooking usages. Such important is the crude oil that no matter how obscure a nation is, once blessed with it, it comes into reckoning globally.In our own case in Nigeria, the petroleum sector is segmented to Upstream (for exploration and exploitation of crude oil) and downstream for local refining and distribution of petroleum products. In the downstream sector, Nigeria has four refineries: the old Port-Harcourt and the new Port-Harcourt refineries, the Warri and the Kaduna refineries with total installed crude refineries capacity for 455,000 barrels per day. Gross mismanagement and corruption however, have left these refineries working at best at 45 percent of the installed capacity even when NNPC staff are the highest remunerated in the Nigerian public service. Each new government in succession claim to spend billions of naira on the Turn Around Maintenance (TAM) of these refineries and yet, news has it that they remain decrepit to the extent that no private investor is willing to buy them at a good price.On the other hand, government's penchant for profligacy, misplacement of priorities, unbridled consumption of luxury and flagrant flaunting of ill-gotten wealth by men in power have trickled down infectiously to the lowest rung of society leading to a surge in the daily consumption of petroleum finished products.Between 1979 when the last of the four existing refineries was built by Murtala/Obasanjo regime and now, there has been more than 1000 percent increase in the number of vehicles plying Nigeria's decrepit roads with most of them packed out used for high fuel consumption and emission problems from their countries of origin in Western Europe. Our average daily consumption of PMS according to recent research is 32 million litres. Thus a high supply gap has continued to remain a permanent feature of the downstream sector in the past three decades and compounding annually without a decisive response to mitigate the tragedy by successive governments. Rather, the 'temporary' respite of bridging via importation of refined petroleum products has been sustained into a permanent feature by corruption and felonious conspiracy in which our 'big men' now compete to outdo themselves in the big crime of round- tripping on the high sea. The entire petroleum sector is operated with lack of accountability, openness and transparency thereby creating a safe haven for criminal cabals to thrive. These cabals are the beneficiaries of Petroleum Equalisation Fund (PEF) and the Petroleum Subsidy Fund (PSF). The so-called subsidy has now been suddenly discovered to be flowing into the wrong pockets or overflowing to some at the expense of others in the looting game and hence it is high time it is stopped. So many questions beg for answers at this juncture. Who is subsidising what' At what cost' How' If Nigeria, an oil rich nation over the last three decades through inept and corrupt leadership, has refused to transform from crude oil exporter to finished petroleum products magnate and exporter but prefers to ground our refineries to continue to import fuel from their offshore interests, is it the Nigerian people that are subsidising leadership's inefficiency and corruption or the leaders are the ones subsidising the people who they have cruelly raped of development and employment opportunities
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