It appears eerily quiet, for now, in the petroleum sector of the Nigerian economy. The recent dust raised by the heated disagreement between the Dangote Group, headed by business mogul and Africa’s cousin of Elon Musk, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, and the skippers of National Union of Petroleum and National Gas Workers of Nigeria (NUPENG), in league with Petroleum and Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN), has unveiled Dangote as a healthy jab at the petroleum branch of Nigeria’s political economy, where, for more than five decades, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation Limited (NNPCL) had maintained a fossilised monopoly.
Dangote’s calculated, but furiously delivered jab, with a devastating effect, could be likened to Cassius Clay’s series at Sonny Liston, during their epic bout, on 24 February 1964, which posted the young pugilist from Louisville, Kentucky, United States of America (USA), as the next champion of the world. It is, perhaps, safe to argue that, henceforward, Dangote would represent a progressive movement, with a conscious intent to recraft the economic history of Nigeria – one in which he would be lavishly honoured as the daring, independently-shrewd entrepreneur, who not only breached the NNPCL’s notorious, opaque fastness of the Nigerian oil and gas loop.
For to be true, the Dangote jab – the petroleum refinery built at the gargantuan cost of $20 billion, located close to the Atlantic pond, in Lagos, is about the most highly visible private investment in the Nigerian economy – since the past five decades. For its uniqueness, the United Nations Industrial Organization (UNIDO) has, gushingly, applauded Dangote as a new, promising entrant in the crucial downstream stretch of the Nigerian economy.
A majority of private investors in the Nigerian oil and gas sector are the corrupt owners of refineries, in the Mediterranean region, owners of oil depots, tanker owners, independent marketers, etc. They are like lions that, were they to have their way, the Dangote refinery should end up in their entrails.
For what it’s been – and the circumstance of its birth – the Dangote refinery qualifies as the greatest seismic jab that has broken the myth, so to speak, of the tectonic plate of the Nigerian oil and gas industry – where, for too long, the NNPCL had taken its dominance – with openly, unconscionable complacency and arrogance – as impregnable.
It was just natural, as a result, that a vicious cabal rose, from that complacent milieu, right from the refinery’s dawn, to cripple the Dangote ground-breaking jab, of colossal private investment, in the Nigerian oil and gas industry. What’s of interest, all the same, to the Nigerian oil consumer, is that the Dangote Group won the epic match against the NUPENG-PENGASSAN duo; a duo that is akin to an economic philistine, with a famous, sole interest in check-off dues, that it does not account for.
The victory of the Dangote Group sends a message: you don’t parrot ‘Aluta Continua, victoria e certa’, when dealing with Africa’s richest man. Dangote’s someone, who, for his deep roots, in the Nigerian economy, you show unreserved respect. You’d do well to engage him in a constructive dialogue; not confrontation, in imitation of the Imoudus, Sunmonus and Oshiomholes. The times have long changed. These are democratic times; you engage in discussions, peaceful protests, etc.
When the crisis that vaulted Dangote to the apex of private investment in the Nigerian oil industry started, little respect was shown him, with a clear touch of malice, by his accusers, who said that he had breached a section of the country’s labour laws. To his accusers, it was convenient to overlook the fact that his refinery would create massive jobs, encourage the entrance of more of his polished tribe into the rock oil loop, pay gargantuan tax to government, consign to history the notorious – if often instigated by a vicious league – artificial scarcity of petrol, nationwide – and, more than anything else, start a gradual, firm and focused process that would, ultimately, discontinue the importation of petrol from, as Dangote revealed, not so long ago, Malta and elsewhere.
Add the Atlantic paradise called Sao Tome and Principe, where, like Malta, the refineries, that feed the Nigerian consumers with petrol, are owned by their brethren, whose fervent supplication – each time they prayed to Christ, for instance, since the mid-90s – has been to cripple the country’s four refineries in Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna.
With the birth of the Dangote refinery, never again, to the happiness of parasitic and destructive apostles of petrol importation, should Nigeria remain dependent on the imported petroleum. By now, the melodious hymns of production of the foreign refineries should be at their closing stanzas. The Dangote refinery would, for certain, jab – tellingly – on the once, ever-ballooning bank accounts of sponging, destructive importers of petrol.
As Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, as finance minister, once posited, petrol importation was a criminal drain of the country’s resources. It was poor economics, in that it snatched much-sought-after jobs from skilled, able-bodied Nigerians, who were graduates of tertiary institutions, and imported them to the countries where refined crude oil was shipped in.
The victory of Dangote, in the bout with NUPENG and PENGASSAN, ought, by now, to prod the Tinubu administration to dispose of the four wasteful refineries. In classical economics, government has no business in running any enterprise that is designed to succeed. It was this belief that prodded the process of commercialization and privatisation of government-owned corporations, in the early days of the Babangida years. Government’s duty, it is, in a classical Keynesian fashion, to create an enabling milieu of security of investments, enact fair labour laws that make for a tidy transfer of capital, mobility of labour, draw foreign direct investments, amongst others.
The Dangote victory – if forecasts by UNIDO, Petroleum Intelligence and International Energy Agency are any guide – is sure, in the near term, of seven years from now, to attract nearly N990 billion into the refinery or downstream sector of the Nigerian economy.
The Dangote victory, no doubt, has come with some inevitable burden: the search for the enemies of Lekki, who are no longer at ease after their monopoly in the petrol industry has been deservedly dumped in a morgue. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, one offers, should be personally invested in the Dangote search for the enemies of the Lekki refinery. Wide awake, as a mantra for caution, should be the slogan of the Dangote Group – henceforward. And, as Dangote himself, may have found, those who were opposed to his healthy jab, in the oil industry, were akin to the Luddites, who, in the opening years of the 19th century England, were opposed to industrial progress.
Even so, the Dangote refinery has come to stay. Its location in Lagos: Africa’s fifth largest economy, structured on a population of nearly 22 million, is a sound economic one; would provide gargantuan market of a steady cluster of consumers of its petrol and by-products.
For his industrial achievements, Alhaji Aliko Dangote deserves to jab at the country’s unproductive refineries. With him as their new owners, it is almost certain – as certain as sun up – that the era of gargantuan waste, where parasites, who do nothing, but draw unusually fat, monthly salaries abound – would melt away. The Alhaji Aliko Dangote phenomenon is one that merits some doctoral theses, as it opens a new progressive chapter, in the crucial oil loop, of the Nigerian political economy. He deserves an award from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) – for his priceless contribution – to the happiness of Nigeria’s oil and gas sector.
Uzuakpundu is a Lagos-based journalist.
