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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