Petrol Should Not Sell For More Than N40 Per Litre – David-West

A former Minister of Petroleum, Prof. Tam David-West, speaks about his misgivings against the running of the petroleum ministry, corruption and sundry other national issues in this interview with AKINWALE ABOLUWADE

You have been criticising the Minister of Petroleum, what is the point of disagreement?

When you are assessing your colleagues after you, you are also in another context putting yourself on the line to be assessed. Of course, we are public officers and public officers must open themselves up for assessment by anybody. The assessment should be constructive and should help the system. I don’t talk to press and I don’t write anything without praying to God to guide me. My prayer has always been very simple. I thank God for granting me the talent of social analysis and commentary.

I thank God for that blessing. I pray to God to direct my thoughts and pen, my words and actions. Whatever I am going to use the talent for must glorify God’s name and contribute positively to the system. If God directs me and people are not happy with what I have said and they are annoyed I have no apologies. I know Diezani (Alison-Madueke) for as long as she was working for Shell. I know her father too. But I am not happy with her stewardship, not based on my own time as a benchmark, but based on what I know. What is good everybody knows is good.

Diezani should consider what I am saying constructively. Every human being is the best judge of himself. You know your weaknesses and strengths more than anybody else. The industry, as it is, is terrible. As I have always said, any minister or government that cannot manage the Nigerian oil industry well is a failure. Over 90 per cent of the money Nigeria has abroad is from oil. Oil makes about 85 per cent of our budget. Diezani is free to say whatever she likes about me. The public will judge. One of her problems is that I don’t think she does her job faithfully. She did not prepare herself well for the task of a petroleum minister.

I became the minister with the background of a virologist. I didn’t know anything about oil. I never met (Maj.-Gen. Muhammadu) Buhari before he appointed me and he had been a petroleum minister before me. Buhari is a brilliant person. He can match many professors. What I did was that I first understudied him. I got a lot of instructions from him. Then the heads of the oil companies in the country became my personal friends. Mobil, Shell and a number of them became personal friends and not drinking friends; the ones I can ask for guidance. From them, I gained a lot. I also asked questions to cross-check from members of my staff. I discussed with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation as if it was a seminar in the university.

I didn’t take oil policies to the government without informing the oil companies that ‘this is what I want to do, what is your position?’ They will make their input. So, I never brought in a policy in which there was a friction. For example, the flaring of gas: Government after government had said that oil companies should stop flaring gas. During (President Shehu) Shagari’s time, the FG said if they flared gas, the government would seize their licence. They could not be threatened; they said if they stopped flaring gas, they would stop production. Now, the Federal Government made a political policy without studying the science behind it. There is no place where they do oil drilling and they don’t flare gas. I have been to the Gulf, I travelled extensively in Saudi Arabia, they flare gas.

The rationale is to consult before making a policy. The policy will affect not only Nigerians, but also the operators. They are very vital; so, we don’t have to antagonise them just as we don’t have to pamper them. We must bring them on board whenever we want to make a policy that will affect them. What I did was that I sent Mr. Green (an engineer) and two others to go round the oil producing areas. They brought the record of all the gas flaring fields. There are three types of oil wells. For the first, they must flare gas if they must drill oil, if you tell them to stop flaring it means you are telling them to stop drilling oil and the Nigerian economy will collapse. They can also re-inject. We identified the fields where they must flare and gave them authority to flare. Where they can afford not to flare there is an alternative for re-injection. But, we fined them by calculating how many cubic of gas they flared.

It is not easy to tell the oil companies that you want to fine them. I called a meeting and told them the government knows they must flare gas but in those areas where they can inject without flaring gas, we will fine them if they flare gas. I knew the names of the directors of the oil companies at the time, so at meetings, I would call them by their first names and we would discuss. I would joke with them. The policy was approved by the oil companies. Nigeria needs the oil companies. All of them complied before I left. During Shagari’s administration, the policy could not stand so they reneged. But this time, the policy went through with an approval. If I didn’t bring them on board they would give me problems and I needed them. All of them complied till I left.

Under Diezani, they make the oil companies look as if they are enemies. Even the Senate president said the oil companies should not threaten us. Diezani is brilliant, I am a virologist and she is an architect. The oil minister of Saudi Arabia was in the position for 25 years. He is a lawyer. So, it is not your field that matters but how God guides you to use it. But there is too much corruption in the oil sector in Nigeria.

Some people wonder why you are not satisfied with the performances of your successors in the petroleum ministry.

If I take a job, I will give it my all. Why I am complaining is that I know where they are failing. They sometimes have not been able to resist personal interests. If you are doing that type of job and you have a tinge of personal interest, you have failed. One contract of oil can make you a multi-millionaire in dollars. Many people have not been able to resist this. Now, they are talking about local content. It is good for Nigerians but they should not glamorise it. When I was minister, I told the oil companies that they could not remove a white person, whose tenure has expired, from a position and replace him with another white man. You must check with me if there is no Nigerian that is suitable to fill the vacant position. It is a good policy and Buhari approved it but it was later cancelled by another administration.

You have always insisted that the Federal Government’s subsidy is a fluke. What prove have you?

I challenged President Goodluck Jonathan and all his ministers to a public debate on oil subsidy, but they refused to take the challenge. I have the facts that there is no subsidy, Buhari and the late Chief Gani Fawehinmi said there was no subsidy. Fawehinmi wrote a pamphlet on it. Oil subsidy is all a fraud. At a Gani Fawehinmi lecture, I said the amount the Federal Government would get from oil subsidy was like an amoeba that is always changing shape.

The government gave 10 different figures that we could get, so we know it doesn’t exist. They will bring fuel from Port Harcourt to Lagos and say it is imported. It is fraud and the navy has proved it. If any government delights in making life difficult for the people, God will punish them. In every society, the poor are more in number than the rich. Let the government’s policy be directed towards alleviating the suffering of the masses. If you develop a policy against the masses, you are going against God. They had a conference in Lagos on subsidy. They did not invite me; they avoided me because they would be exposed.

Petrol should not sell for more than N40 per litre. After my calculation, a professor of petroleum (a Nigerian based in Texas) sent an article to the media, saying petroleum should not cost more than N35 per litre. They are lying.

Do you agree with the objectives of the Subsidy Reinvestment programme of the FG?

SUREP is a fraud. How can you invest what you don’t have? You are going to put money into that project from other sources. They have not invested well. They just used the SURE Project as a palliative for Nigerians. They are getting money for the SURE project by punishing the people. It is all propaganda. They said they were going to have millions of work, but they have nothing because the premise is wrong and faulty. I said there is no subsidy on technical grounds. It is callous – what do you have the international price for? You don’t need any international price because the oil was given to us by God. We have refineries and why don’t you drill the oil? Get the product you want to consume into the refineries, refine and sell at the filling stations. So, forget about the international price. But they increased the price and punished the people. They sabotage the refineries by making them moribund. As I am talking to you, no Nigerian refinery is working up to 30 per cent capacity. By this, they create an artificial problem and start to import fuel. We are drilling and there are four refineries but all of them are having problems. The vital parts of the refineries are destroyed.

Don’t you think it is the system that is supporting the illegality?

We can link the problem to poor value system. You cannot do that during the Buhari administration. But what is happening now is that when the leadership cannot address the issue, people will take chances because they know they can get away with it. A former petroleum minister has a filling station and he attends oil marketers’ meeting. He is no longer a minister but a marketer.

Should the President have the sole power to approve licence for oil blocks?

One of the things that I have against Diezani is that the petroleum minister in Nigeria has a lot of power even before my time. The Petroleum Industry Bill gives the minister more powers that he can award and revoke any contract without recourse to anybody. It is crazy to put all the livewire of a country in the hands of one person. The minister should not have all that power. At the National Assembly, Diezani’s argument defeated her. She mentioned Malaysia and Norway as countries where the oil ministers have so much power. A minister that uses Malaysia and Norway to justify a policy in the oil sector is an ignorant minister. Why don’t you use Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Venezuela, who are big players in the oil industry? What is the role of Malaysia in the global oil market? She didn’t use the appropriate examples.

How well is Jonathan’s administration faring in terms of touching the lives of Nigerians?

If Jonathan is thinking that the Nigerian economy is doing well, I am sorry for him. I criticise him to put him right. What will I derive by criticising a president that is doing well? If I do, I will ridicule myself. Unfortunately for Jonathan, his advisers are not fair to him. Machiavelli in his book, The Prince, said, “For the prince or leader to be wisely advised, he also should be wise in the first place.” What is wrong with Jonathan is that he takes hook, line and sinker whatever he is told.

He is a PhD holder, who should be grounded in the methodology of investigation. He listens to Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as if she is a repository of wisdom. How do you judge that your economy has gone up? Is it by how much you have in your foreign reserve? That is nonsense. It is like saying you have money in your bank account and still complaining that you are hungry. There is poverty in the land but the President is comfortable with getting an approval for N1bn food money to feed himself and his deputy in a year. Are their stomachs digesting rocks? He should be very careful and know that God is not asleep and there is nothing that touches God than the cries of the poor. Any leader that makes the poor people unhappy should be very careful.

How do you assess infrastructural development under this administration?

What infrastructure? What is the cause of the grouse between Jonathan and Governor Rotimi Amaechi? It is the East-West Road. It is very bad. Sometimes you pay someone to push your car on that road. Jonathan and his minister for Niger Delta abused Amaechi and painted the governor in bad light. No infrastructure. Education is finished.

The National Assembly members were accused of collecting so much money as salaries but they passed the buck to the executive. How do you react to this?

It is nonsense. What they are saying is that my neighbour is a thief so I must be a thief. Why can’t you correct your neighbours? Were they not the ones that approved the salaries for the executive? But the economy is suffering. Someone wrote in The Sun that a senator in Nigeria can employ four Barrack Obama, the American President. It shows we are not serious. The economy is down. When it comes to helping themselves at the expense of the poor, they do it. President Jonathan has 10 presidential jets and two are still coming at the state’s expense. The Prime Minister of Britain goes in public transport. He has no fleet.
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