Who Did We Offend?

By Yaya Ademola

God seems to have specially favoured Nigeria. Rain falls at its own time. Sun rises and sets accordingly. From far North to East and West, our land is very fertile. There is hardly any grain planted that will not germinate in three days. Cash crops like Cocoa, Cotton, Cashew, Palm, etc grow glowingly. Beneath our soil and waters, there are stupendous mineral resources – Gold, Copper, and Limestone amongst several others. Interestingly, we have crude oil in commercial quantity! Again, we are blessed with a huge population of 200 million people that can produce and consume whatever product, and export the excess.

We are so favoured that we don’t experience natural disasters like hurricane and earthquake. Every of our disasters is man-made and negligence like inferno from petroleum pipe burst while people are bailing out fuel;flood as a result of indiscipline on the part of the people dumping refuse in the drainages and government lackadaisical attitude to dredging rivers as at when due; building collapse as a result of use of less quality materials and compromising posture of the Town Planning Authority; automobile crashes by reckless drivers, low quality spare-parts and bad roads that government refuses to repair among numerous needless disasters.

We are so unique that we do not have technical knowhow to explore and exploit most of our natural endowments. We are simply rent collectors. Multinationals like ExxonMobil are the ones who explore our crude oil and tell us the quantity of barrels explored!  We find it difficult to refine our crude oil. We have about 140 universities. What do we do with the Chemical Engineers produced by some of these schools? We export crude oil and import the refined notwithstanding that we have four refineries that gulp millions of dollars in Turn-Around Maintenance (TAM). The four refineries have capacity to refine 445,000 barrels per day. Meanwhile, the total domestic petroleum consumption per day is 409,000. That leaves us with excess 36,000 refined barrels on a daily basis which could be exported or put in reserve. Instead, everybody is on the lookout to Dangote Group of Companies to refine crude oil for us by year 2021.

If we could refine our crude oil and export the excess, hundreds of thousands jobs would have been created and the sky-high prices of the refined products per litre would plummet.

Since 1970, Iron ore and coal deposits which are the core ingredients required for the establishment of a Steel Millwere discovered in commercial quantity. Ajaokuta Steel Rolling Mill was initiated by Yakubu Gowon military regime in the 1970s.  It was 95% complete when President Shehu Sagari inaugurated it with the hope that revenue generated from it would be used to complete it.  This is an industry that has the capacity to create 500,000 jobs and 10,000 technical staff. It has potential to produce 1.3 million tonnes of liquid steel per year which will make Nigeria a major producer in industrial machinery, auto-electrical spare parts, shipbuilding, railways and carriages that will lead to another job creation and make life better to the people and save a lot of dollars on imported steel. 42 years after, Ajaokuta Steel Rolling Mill is yet to operate. Machine tools in Osogbo, Katsina and Jos that were to be processing steel bars from Warri and Ajaokuta into rods have since been shutdown. Presently, President Muhammadu Buhari has inaugurated a team headed by Boss Mustapha to revive the mill and one only hopes that it will not be business as usual.

How could steel production, a great catalyst to economic development, be made to suffer for so long? There are insinuations that successive governments from second republic have used Ajaokuta project as a conduit pipe to siphon money.  It seems that our leaders have compromised national interest. It looks like the producers with which we import auto-electrical spare-parts, cars and other allied things that our steel mill would have produced have been compromised our leaders. Hence, it has remained moribund for over four decades. If this insinuation is true, previous Nigerian leaders have a case to answer.

What of electricity generation and distribution? Unquantifiable money has been injected into it without any positive result. It has been hovering between 3,500 to 4,000 megawatts for a country of 200 million people! South Africa, with the population of 59.4 million, generates 51,309 megawatt with the vision to increase it with an addition 19,400 MW by 2030. It releases 34,000 megawatt of electricity to its populace.

Why is it that nothing seems to work here but when we travel out of Nigeria, we make things work? Why is it that we have abdicated every responsibility and handed them over to God? Do we expect God to fix steel rolling mill, refineries, electricity amongst others? For a very long time, successive governments would be telling us, “Government has no business in business” so as to abdicate responsibility of delivering dividend of democracy to the people. What is the real business of government? The leaders seem to be bereft of ideas on how to move the society forward while the followers appear to be stranded.

The followers must get organised via their unions and organisations to challenge the leaders for account of stewardship by every legitimate means, especially when leaders appear comfortable, unprepared for any change and without moral conscience or loyalty to the followers. Onus is on the followers to wake up and shine their eyes. “If we fight, we may win. If we don’t, we have lost already”. The deal is that if we live a life so tough, we should at least spare our children and future generation the prospect of a life we live today.

Yaya Ademola writes from Alekuwodo, Osogbo. He can be contacted via ademolayaya1@gmail.com, 08037127929.