ACN, ex-minister differ on oil subsidyTHOUGH the Federal Government has pushed its plan to deregulate the downstream sector of the petroleum industry to the front burner, it is yet to formally meet with key stakeholders in the sector.The plan continued to draw criticism yesterday as the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) deplored the failure of the government to improve the lot of the citizens through good policies.But Ambassador Festus B.I. Porbeni, former Minister of Transport, has supported the removal of the fuel subsidy as proposed by the Federal Government. Rear Admiral Porbeni (rtd), who is also the Romanian Consular General in the Niger Delta, believes that the policy will be of immense benefit to Nigerians instead of a cabal of importers that holds the country to ransom.Porbeni spoke from his Port Harcourt base, in Rivers State, through his media consultant, Sony Neme.The Guardian learnt in Abuja that critical stakeholders such as petrol marketers, Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and Trade Union Congress (TUC) are yet to be briefed on the planned implementation of the policy.A deputy president of NLC, Kiri Mohammed, told The Guardian on telephone that the congress was yet to get any invitation from government to begin negotiations over the deregulation.He said: 'We have not got any invitation from the Federal Government to discuss the planned deregulation. However, we got an invitation to a meeting by the Ministry of Labour and Productivity and the agenda was not to discuss deregulation but matters affecting Labour relations in the country. We believe that government is not ready for deregulation because if it is, it would have invited us for a dialogue.'Marketers have also revealed that government is yet to contact them for their input into the planned deregulation policy.The Executive Secretary of Major Marketers Association of Nigeria (MOMAN), Obafemi Olawore, told journalists in Abuja that government was yet to consult the association on the issue.He said: 'The marketers have not been invited by the government either to a forum or to a committee to make input into the planned deregulation. I don't know the programme of government but I can say it here that government has not invited us as I speak. In 1998, there was going to be a deregulation, there was a deregulation between January and June of 1999, government invited all of us. All the stakeholders had to sit down and agreed on the modus operandi, how to go about it during the transition period so that there won't be any product outage.'Olawore also charged Labour unions to stop antagonising government on deregulation saying, 'what Labour unions should do is to form a committee with government to monitor development projects government commits itself to execute and ensure that they are completed and serve the purpose they were planned for. They would be justified if after such projects failed to achieve the purpose, they protest and even shut down the country because government has failed to implement projects for the overall benefit of the people. But opposing the deregulation policy even before it is implemented is not the right way to go.'He also faulted the call for the passage of the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) pending before the National Assembly before the implementation of the deregulation policy.'When did they start talking about the PIB' It has not been passed all this while. And from the feelers now, the National Assembly may have to start work on the PIB all over again, which will take another two to three years. Is that what we want' Is that what Nigerians want' Very well then. All of us will go through it. The time to deregulate the oil industry was yesterday and not even today. We should have done this long time ago,' he said.Instead of subsidising petrol, Olawore advocated subsidising agriculture and research and development for the purpose of re-focusing the economy for even-spread of national development.He added: 'Regulation of the downstream has rendered everybody indolent. The two most critical areas government should regulate should be agriculture and research and development. These two areas will encourage people to go back to the farms and produce food for the people and we can then stop food importation that is killing our economy. Nigeria as at today cannot feed itself. That is the truth that we must appreciate and make a resolve to confront.'There have also been calls ongovernment to constitute lobby groups to spearhead the mass education of Nigerians on the advantages of deregulation.The Group Executive Director (Trading and Supply) of MRS Holdings Limited, Mrs. Amina Maina, said that constituting few individuals within government to propagate the deregulation message would not be effective.'What I think is critical is that government needs to engage people who can help educate people on the positive sides of deregulation. Government, on its own, also needs to engage different people, bodies, organisations, students' unions to embark on mass education of Nigerians to see what the country is losing by regulating this important industry,' she said.In a statement in Lagos yesterday by its National Publicity Secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, the ACN also condemned the reduction of the subsidy removal debate to a purely fiscal issue, without considering the responsibility of the government to improve the lives of the people through prudent management of state resources.''Primarily, the basic objective of any fiscal policy is to improve the living conditions of the people through poverty reduction and the provision of welfare services. The removal of subsidy must therefore go beyond the cheap argument of improving the solvency of the government.''To reduce the responsibility of the government to its citizens to Naira and Kobo tokenism is tantamount to abdicating responsibility, and this has far reaching consequences not only on the sustainability of our democracy but the continued existence of the nation as a unified entity,'' it said.According to the ACN, the government's argument that the subsidy benefits some members of a faceless cartel will begin to have meaning only if the government names the beneficiaries and tells Nigerians why they cannot be stopped from fleecing the state.To the party, the only reason the issue of fuel subsidy has continued to recur is because Nigeria imports petroleum products for domestic consumption, warning that so long as importation continues, the problem that the government sets out to confront would continue like a recurring decimal.According to the party, the template being used by the government, which puts the pump price per litre of petrol at N144.70 instead of the existing price of N65, is fraught with inaccuracies and amounts to making the ordinary Nigerian to pay for the inefficiency of relevant government agencies.''In any case, why should Nigeria, with huge crude oil deposits, have to import refined products' Why should Nigerians pay for the resources so bestowed on them by God through their noses' Why is the price of products, even among importer/exporter nations higher in Nigeria' The answer lies in the crude, prebendal, corruption-ridden state system that we run in this country.''For example, the pump price of petrol in Iran is N58.40, N30.66 in Kuwait, N32.12 in Qatar, and N17.52 in Saudi Arabia while it is a meager N5.84 in Venezuela. In Egypt, pump price ofpetrol is N46.72, while it is N39.42 in Bahrain. It is N135 in the U.S. for high premium inclusive of all state and federal taxes,'' ACN said.As a way out of the subsidy conundrum, the party proposed the setting up of modular refineries with a total of 280,000 barrels per day refining capacity in nine cities - Gusau, Enugu, Ibadan, Kano, Makurdi, Maiduguri, Lagos, Auchi and Gombe, in addition to reviving the existing ones.
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