Matters Arising – Between The NNPCL Dropped Offtaker Role And Dangote Petrol Price
To many Nigerians, it has become a festival of promises. In fact, it has become a cliché to hear that the refineries, whether Portharcourt, Warri or Kaduna, would work. Since 2015, when the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, wrested powers from the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, which held sway for 16 years, there have been promises of a turnaround maintenance of the Port Harcourt Refinery and others and their eventual operation, but none has ever come to fruition. It has all been deceptions couched in political propaganda to hoodwink the Nigerian masses!
The decision of the NNPCL to hand off its monopolistic sole off-taker role of Dangote petrol is another deliberate policy to drive home President Tinubu’s notorious “Fuel subsidy is gone” statement as the final nail to lock Nigerians in the coffin of poverty.
Nigerians don’t need to have a doctorate degree in Economics to understand the dynamics of marginal price fixing by any organization or Dangote Refinery Limited, DRL, to sell her refined petrol. But the involvement of the NNPCL as a middleman-monopolist, directly increases the price of petrol produced by the DRL, especially when the additional charges of imported petrol, Shipping charge, NPA port charge, NIMASA and other logistic charges, etcetera, are not included in the cost of locally refined DRL petrol. In a word, the involvement of the NNPCL as a middleman in the distribution of the DRL petrol further increases the price of the product at filling stations!
And so, what will be the expected benefit to Nigerians that the NNPCL has given up its role as the sole off-taker of Dangote Refinery Limited petrol?
It may sound cheering to hear that the NNPCL has dropped her offtaker role as the sole distributor of the DRL, creating a direct opportunity to major marketers to buy from the DRL. Unless this development will reduce the price of petrol to Nigerians, it is another bogey to further pauperize Nigerians by increasing the price of locally refined petrol! Nigerians have been too pauperized to afford petrol, especially locally refined petrol, not with the recently approved minimum wage at a miserly N70,000, when a bag of 50kg rice is out of the reach of a Nigerian worker at the price of N80,000.
Sadly, the NNPCL, DRL and the Minister of Petroleum, President Tinubu, are taking Nigerians on a journey to the land of perpetuated penury.
By the way, suddenly, the GCEO of the NNPCL, Mele Kyari, has suddenly lost his voice, he has vanished into the air, and has suddenly become incommunicado on the public space when the words, ‘petrol’ and ‘NNPCL’ are mentioned.
Whatever, Nigerians vividly remember Mele Kyari’s assurances, “Read my lips, the Porthacourt refinery will start production in August 2023”.
On Thursday, March 13, 2024, Kyari informed Nigerians that the Portharcourt refinery had received 450,000 barrels of crude for processing since the mechanical completion of the plant in December 2023. So, what has happened to the 450,000 barrels of crude oil since then?
The GCEO of the NNPCL Mele Kyari and the Minister of Petroleum, President Tinubu, owes Nigerians more, indepth answers than the snippets of rumours that the government is feeding Nigerians. The good news is that, lies, subterfuge and deliberate falsehoods, have a timeline to run their full cycle albeit attempts to cover them.
By Onorakpene Eviosekwofa