Water, water everywhere
Nor any drop to drink.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Lyrical Ballads, 1798
Going through the oil and gas industry in Nigeria is like making your way through a maze, and unravelling the secret information the sacred cows in the industry are not ready to let go. There is an unending cyclical search for the demons that have bedeviled the Nigerian oil industry, and the closer you think you are to this stranger–than–fiction behemoth of a management of this choice organisation, the more befuddled you would appear further from a knowledge of it. This corporation was recently unbundled into several other companies with the mother company becoming the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Ltd (NNPCL).
Now, it has become a hydra-headed monster with such economic upstarts as: Nigerian Petroleum Development Company Ltd, (NPDC Ltd), Pipelines and Product Marketing Company Ltd (PPMC), Port Harcourt Refining and Petrochemical Company (PHRPCL), National Petroleum Investment Management Services (NAPIMS), Warri Refining and Petrochemical Company (WRPC), NNPC Retail Company, Nigerian Gas Company Ltd (NGCL), Kaduna Refining and Petrochemical Company, Ltd (KRPCL), Nidas Marine Ltd, Nigerian Gas Processing and Transportation Company Ltd (NGPTC), Duke Oil Services (UK) Ltd, West African Gas Ltd, Nikorma Transport Ltd (NETCO), Duke Oil Company Inc. Under this long list of companies, there are other duplications and mystery contraptions like NNPC Ref Chem Ltd, (NRCL), NNPC Downstream Investment Services (NDIS), Nigerian Pipelines and Storage Company Ltd (NPSC), National Energy Reserve Management Company (NERMC), which were in existence as at February 2024.
Furthermore, in order to adjust to its new operations under the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA), Integrated Data Services Limited (IDSL), NNPC Oilfield Services Ltd and Frontier Exploration Services have also been merged to form a new NNPC Energy Services Ltd under the new name, NNPC Energy Services Ltd (EnServ).
NNPC’s metamorphosis has yielded at least 20 companies set up, not to address national interests, but to contain the ego and corruptive influences of their larger–than–life officers whose life styles, the regular Nigerian corruption melting– pot is too small to accommodate. The growing elastic proclivities of the ethnicists in this highly guarded financial hatchery which only the president can oversee, disrupts the templates for critical accountability tests, such that passing the buck becomes the name of the game, where artful dodgers resort to ethno-religious and regional obscurantist tactics to obfuscate their national scandal.
Nigerians who find themselves weighed down by this national contraption do not even feel at ease to ventilate even their most harmless and inaudible whimpers. It is as if we have become dermatillomaniacs as we turn to ourselves in senseless sibling hate as was recently enacted in the elite-sponsored #Igbomustgo campaign in Lagos, which shows that the Igbophobia of the mid-1960s which culminated in the avoidable national disaster we called the Nigerian civil war never went away 54 years after the war was said to have ended. If you ask me, why do Nigerians excoriate? I would simply say that the reasons are legion. The common triggers include, hunger, unemployment, ethnicism, stress, anxiety, boredom, tiredness or anger because of our inability to find answers to our perennial state of social and economic impotence and infantilism.
The NNPCL was set up to harness Nigeria’s oil and gas keep tab on the reserves for sustainable national development. It explores, produces, refines crude oil, and markets and retails petroleum products as well. It also has responsibility for upstream and downstream developments and is charged with regulating and supervising our burgeoning oil industry. Embedded in these functions are the responsibilities to: oversee the development of the oil sector, develop the oil producing area, fix the prices of products, and ensure regular supply of products. But has it done these? Under our monocultural economic circumstances, it is too dangerous to have the NNPCL in the hands of gamblers and ethnic champions.
Under the listed functions, the NNPCL has failed the Nigerian people. Rather, NNPCL has been involved in the underdevelopment of the oil sector, the oil producing areas, and ensuring irregular and uninterrrupted supply of products. An oil producing area like Akwa Ibom State has benefitted almost nothing from the NNPCL and the Nigerian Government. The discovery of oil in the area, which first occurred in 1937 at Ikot Akata in today’s Mkpat Enin Local Government Area, has brought the people a lifetime of regrets.
What we see is a tale of how NNPCL underdeveloped the oil-producing areas like Akwa Ibom. Even this mega-company has not been able to meet its avowed vision of being a dynamic global energy company of choice nor its mission of reliably delivering energy while continuously creating value for ALL stakeholders. In this instance, the real stakeholders are the fraudulent federal officials, the bogus business men and oil thieves and government’s desire to continue to suppress the oil-producing areas, especially if they are an ethnic minority within the minority complex.
The Akwa Ibom State Government must rise from its lethargy and confront the dragon even when the action may lead to denials. The time calls for sacrifices from the politicians and the people. We should not remain passive when other regions are reaping bountifully from our resources. We should not live by the stream and then wash our hands with spittle.