Fuel Scarcity: The marketers, NNPC and citizens’ angle (Part II)

Those who take pride in smuggling, deceiving themselves that it is through their smuggling activities that Nigerians are able to get rice to eat, they will have a hotter clime doing their business this year and President Buhari, I gathered but not yet confirmed, has decided that not only that smuggled items will be seized but that the smugglers will be apprehended and put on the process of being jailed.  I recommend that smugglers and customs officials who aide their activities should be given death sentence because they are terrorists in nature!  Same treatment should also be applied to oil marketers sabotaging the chances of Nigerians to access good and standard living.

By Bashir Adefaka

Preamble: If you are reading this part of the piece for the first time, I advise you stop here and go first to Part I to enable get the sequential order intended to aide your understanding of the message being passed in it.  But if you have read Part I, then you are good to go with this part of the piece.  Happy reading!

Just before the final note, the way the oil marketers cause hardship to Nigerians at yuletide is this: they as an association hold meeting where they agree that out of, for instance, 10 members or filling stations in a city centre, only two should sell fuel to motorists while the remaining eight filling stations close shops claiming that they don’t have supplies.  This way they create panic buying which mounts pressure on the two filling stations selling.  The two stations then decide to say, “Okay, if you are ready to pay N200 per litre, you will get fuel.”  Unfortunately, it is then one motorist will tell the one in the front who is insisting on normal price that, “If you are not ready to buy, leave road let me pass and buy.  Is it not better to get it to buy than not to see fuel at all?”  This way, the oil marketers pushed the vulnerable people into spending far above their means and, to commercial vehicles, they raise their transport fare charges like from N200 Oshodi to Alagbado/Sango/Toll-Gage to N500 or N1000.  Exactly that happened during the just widening up experience and it is so pathetically bad.

Another experience that I found in Shagamu was that, the oil marketers had asked their members to sell only for one hour and close shops and sell the rest through the back door to black marketers.  We got this information directly when the commercial driver we decided to travel with – because in that kind of assignment we have our way of doing things – explained to us.  He said, “This fuel I bought now is 25 litres keg and I bought it for N10,000 meaning that he bought one litre through the back door for N400.  Stakeholders in Shagamu however did something fantastic, which beat the imagination of our investigative journalists during the visit.  They called workers union and some security agents of the NNPC, who went from filling station to filling station in Shagamu and made sure that everything in their respective underground tank was sold off and at official price.  Some of the marketers after being forced to sell off their content travelled out of Shagamu prepared to return only after new year celebration, which was reason for scarcity in Shagamu thereafter.  Ordinarily, life was made difficult for oil marketers in Shagamu to swindle motorists in their areas like their colleagues had done in other parts of Ogun, Lagos, Ondo, Oyo states, FCT and other parts of Nigeria.  More worrisome was that even in order states where DPR sealed off stations, those stations still went round to bribe either DPR officials or security agents and when they got their stations re-opened, they still continue with their swindling price.

On a final note, what we found out that really made the oil marketers to successfully drag the hardship for long like they did was due to inefficiency of the NNPC/DPR and corruption on the part of some security agents.  The marketers had complained that NNPC did not give them enough supplies and it was the reason they gave for the queues at their respective filling stations.  But The DEFENDER’s teams particularly at Shoprite/Toll-Gate axis on Lagos-Abeokuta Expressway going to Sango once saw how tankers laden with fuel were caused by their owners to stop middle of the expressway numbering about ten saying they are protesting.  It therefore became nerve-racking how a people who complained of having no supplies could have supplies but refuse to take them to their stations to sell to motorists.  When asked why the protest, some of the people who spoke to us at the Shoprite/Toll-Gate area said through one of them under condition of anonymity that, “We buy this fuel at the depot at N170 per litre.  How do we now go to our filling station and sell for N145 per litre?  Again, we bribe at depot before we are loaded.  The security at the depot take bribe from us.  The officials of the depot take bribe from us.  All of these bribes, to which account do we place it if we don’t set at from N200 to N400 so that we can realise our investments back?  That is the cause of the problem that you see.”

We and other media outfits reported marketers’ complaints of this nature expecting that the NNPC would act fast on it but no until the situation had dragged to the state of mess that it got to.  This media outfit can authoritative report that greed on the part of oil marketers, inability of the NNPC look into the allegations of bribe and corruption that officials depots engaged in, which was key in the solution required to end the hardship situation.  Reluctantly, later, the NNPC confirmed that the fuel was actually sold for N170 per litre but now explained that the government was being forced to subsidized fuel to the tune of N26 in order to assuage suffering of the people.  The oil marketers could not however deny that they got subsidized fuel to sell for not higher than N145.  Yet, they went ahead to sell higher and still hoarded thereby using their own greed to earn more profits to cause tears and hardship to Nigerians at a period that they should be happy celebrating, knowing full well that Nigerians, because of their lackadaisical attitude towards probing information will blame Buhari for it.

Another reason for the artificial fuel scarcity that I personally cannot really confirm but believe through body language of those responsible is the involvement of opposition politicians, who, like they did either creating and sponsoring Niger Delta Avengers, Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and Boko Haram, all of who are either economic terrorist or boundless terrorist organizations, also saw the unpatriotic oil marketers as ready tools to use in the sabotage of the Muhammadu Buhari Administration.  They are people who politick not of national interest which is supposed to be the interest of the majority of the masses of the Nigerian people but, so bad enough, they politick for their own personal interest.  That is the reason they choose to be remain permanently blind to the many achievements of the ongoing Change Regime pioneered by President Muhammadu Buhari and generality of leaders of the All Progressives Congress (APC) excluding some of them who wear the toga of APC but are, of a surety, PDP elements sitting in the National Assembly of the Federal Republic of Nigeria through which they have consistently sabotaged the efforts of the government to perfect its anti-corruption war since it started in May 2015.

As for the oil marketers getting the benefit of fuel pump price increase, President Buhari has dashed their hope and has broken their back telling them that the people of Nigeria are owners of the government that he presides over and that they are even not having enough ease of life yet and so, that he will not add to their sufferings by increasing fuel pump price.  The President tells them pointblank that there is no way he is going to honour their wicked proposal for fuel pump price hike.  The President, realizing the hands of the opposition politicians to use the so-called fuel scarcity to blackmail him, his government and Nigeria, has also promised them a very unbearable Year 2018.  Nigerians should stop believing these oppositions in the toga of PDP and marketers.  They are the very enemies of Nigeria, who are responsible for the dollar scarcity and high cost of food and other essential commodities in the country in recent times.  But Buhari has made them realise the commitment of his government to stopping importation of rice this 2018.  That is key! It means Dangote, BUA, other legally licensed importers of rice will no longer import rice because, through the Enabling Ease of Doing Business on the part of government in terms of economic diversification, these great Nigerians have enough stock of rice already warehoused for the consumption of the people.  Those who take pride in smuggling, deceiving themselves that it is through their smuggling activities that Nigerians are able to get rice to eat, they will have a hotter clime doing their business this year and President Buhari, I gathered but not yet confirmed, has decided that not only that smuggled items will be seized but that the smugglers will be apprehended and put on the process of being jailed.  I recommend that smugglers and customs officials who aide their activities should be given death sentence because they are terrorists in nature!  Same treatment should also be applied to oil marketers sabotaging the chances of Nigerians to access good and standard living.

*Adefaka, a media practitioner, wrote from Lagos.