…Since when?
By Oduche Azih
MON, OCT 16 2023-theGBJournal| When was the last time that a functioning NNPC-owned fuel depot stored or dispensed any type of Petroleum product?
The corrupt design has for decades been to use use third party facilities on rent providing gaping avenues for the malfeasance that has been routinely underreported over the past several years.
That’s how the Minister of Petroleum, (always the President), the daylight robbers at NNPC will wangle and finangle with the depot owners, often surrogates of people in power. They quietly agree to share and divide the proceeds. Once in a while their greedy disputes burst out into the open.
Come to think of it, how many decades, how many administrations will it take for accusations and counter-accusations concerning Ifeanyi Ubah and his Capital oil to be resolved? Is it when he finally makes Minister in the APC administration or the Igbo-“lokan” president some years down the road? Of course Ubah is just a sampling.
In the line of duty more than twenty years ago I had visited Ibadan NNPC Depot to troubleshoot. Then I had cause to later visit the NNPC Atlas Cove, which I believe to be the largest in West and Central Africa. That place has been out of operations for almost four decades.
It is NEVER mentioned in any speech or national address by either the President, his Vice, the usurpers heading the NNPC or even your everyday DPR management. What kind of conspiracy it that? Meanwhile our lazy pressman and reporters on the Energy beat go for the latest shining toy that the otherwise unemployable Miele Kyari flashes in their faces.
Yes, it’s now CNG!
What crap?
With this, all the previous sins of our Energy planners, (most unworthy of that appellation), are hereby forgiven, right?
It is only in Nigeria that a (newly identified) Energy source, a welcome leg in self-sufficiency and multiple redundancy is hailed as the salvation, the ONLY one! . The subsisting and mismanaged system, in all its glorious complexity, is supposed to be de-emphasised if not totally abandoned.
Who needs crude oil? We can sell or steal that; easier to handle!
By the same token, with CNG to the rescue, why do we have to keep talking about our non-operational oil refineries? And engage in the distraction of apportioning blame?
Except as a routine means of padding the accounts of management and those in government that appointed them?
Regarding CNG, I cannot believe what I hear, the current posturing. People who have never understood the homologous series of hydrocarbons, the physical properties, the Physics, vapor pressure of the liquid fractiouns at ambient temperatures that beed to be contained, suddenly present as know-it-all Engineering Experts on the application of Compressed Natural Gas in automotive applications.
I have resisted being dragged into the useless debate over the quantity, quality, reliability and skills required for this not-so-new technology. In a country and society where Standards mean nothing, why should I? Which Government Agency, the National Automotive Council (in Zaria) headed by Jelani Usman(?) or the non-existent NNPC arm supposedly championing this brave new automotive world?
Nigeria refuses to deliver on simple things BUT insist on dabbling into complicated ones. The other time while still unable to generate even 5000mW into an erratic electricity grid, (that truly needs to be scrapped), television anchors were asking my opinion on the Nuclear Energy Option.
Of course I shot it down, refusing to delve any further into the crazy notion. And this is coming from someone who had done some engineering design off-site and on-site for a number of Nuclear power plants.
Where were we?
Which investigative journalists can promise and deliver on the true status of the NNPC Atlas Cove Depot. I recall two decades ago demanding, that the government/NNPC having found the depot to be no longer of any use, SHOULD SELL IT! A good chunk of the newer capital expenditure by the private sector in identical ventures would have been saved and channeled to other crying needs. What a waste!
Oduche Azih, Lagos
Twitter(X)-@theGBJournal|Facebook-the Government and Business Journal|email:gbj@govbusinessjournal.com| govandbusinessj@gmail.com
