By Suyi Ayodele
This blind man trusted no one because he knew the circumstances that led to his blindness. So, he kept on employing servants after servants to help him in his house chores. The blind man loved roast-yam. But he also found faults with his servants over the yam issue. He believed that while scraping the burnt back of the roast-yam, the servants helped themselves to some bits. That was why he fired them frequently, as they came.
One day, however, a vulpine was engaged as the servant of the blind man. Before taking the appointment, the would-be servant asked questions on why nobody stayed so long in the employ of the blind man. The response he got was that there used to be a loss of confidence between the man and his employees over roast-yam. Many people advised the intending servant not to accept the offer. But he had a better idea and a permanent solution to the yam-roasting wahala.
On the first day he would prepare roast-yam for his master, the blind man, as usual, asked the servant to bring the yam close to him so that he would hear the knife as it scraped the yam. The servant did as he was told. When his master asked him to start to scrape the yam, the servant started and then began to whistle. The servant whistled all through the period he scraped the yam, sliced it into bits and placed it before his master. The blind man was happy.
A man with yam in his mouth cannot whistle, he noted. The master-servant confidence was built. He retained the servant. However, neighbours and relations noticed that the blind man was dropping in stature while the servant was adding weight by the day. The legend tells us what happened between the scraping of the yam and its slicing. That is a story for another day.
There is an ongoing war between Aliko Dangote and President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s government. In the ongoing conflict of confidence between the Dangote Refinery and Federal Government of President Tinubu, the president, I will advise, should take a culture detour and behave like the servant of the proverbial blind man above. Our elder say: when you are scraping the back of a roast-yam for the blind, you are advised to keep whistling so that the blind will know you are not eating the yam.
I have elected to appoint myself into the cabinet of President Tinubu. My ‘friends’ who said I am looking for a job should place congratulatory advertorials in the dailies! Oth-erwise, they would not share in the ‘largesse’ to come! I hold no grudge against those my ‘friends’. It is the way we are wired in this country. Check out most critics of yester-year. They now constitute the lead vocalists of the hallelujah orchestra of this government. Sad for the polity; sad for our being as a nation. In line with my ‘self-appointed appointment’, you are therefore permitted to salute me as ‘The Honourable Senior Special Adviser, Culture and Tradi-tion’, to the President. My first duty in office is on the Dan-gote Petroleum Refinery and the government of President Tinubu. Nigerians don’t trust this government. They are right on that! The government itself has not helped matters.
There is nothing that this present administration, and the one before it has done to convince the people that they meant well for them. Life has become unbearable for Nigerians in the last nine years. The 16 years of the “cluelessness” of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), has paled into insignificance given the pains the All Progressives Congress (APC), which took over government in 2015 has inflicted on the people. It is therefore natural that there would be no confidence between the government and the people.
On any issue, Nigerians have reasons to doubt the sincerity of the government. The Tinubu administration has worsened the situation with its transactional tendencies.
This is why when the conflict of confidence broke out between Dangote Refinery and the government, the public, naturally, moved in support of Dangote. In this present loss of confidence, the people represent the blind man, Dan-gote Refinery is the roast-yam, and Tinubu’s administration is the servant scraping the back of the roast-yam. The government must whistle, and it will whistle all through. Like we say on the streets: the government go explain tire!
Dangote enjoys what other businessmen in the nation would never get. And he is used to the idea of the government bending backwards to accommodate his numerous demands. He cried over the appellation of monopolist he was christened with over the debacle on his refinery and Federal Government represented by the NNPCL. That baffled me. Does it mean that Dangote is not aware that he is the only player in virtually all the ventures he runs in this nation?
However, I must quickly add that the current face-off between the Dangote Refinery and the Federal Government is not what I had wished for. This is simply not the ideal case of breaking someone’s monopoly. The allegations and counter-allegations in the media space are too disturbing.
But in all, the Dangote refinery must not go down. General Muhammadu Buhari, as the sitting president, ‘commis-sioned’ the refinery on Monday, May 22, 2023. That was a week to the end of his tenure. He did that à la Kayode Fayemi, who also ‘commissioned’ the Ekiti Airport on October 18, 2022, and left office on October 18, 2022. Almost two years now, not a single butterfly has touched down at the airport.
Buhari left office as president on May 29, 2023. Seven days to the end of his tenure, the Mai Gaskiya (the honest man) ‘commissioned’ a refinery that a year and two months after, Nigerians are yet to benefit from. Why are we still talking about NNPCL supplying crude to the refinery that was ‘commissioned’ over one year ago?
Why are we like this as a people? Why would a president ‘commission’ a project that was still under construc-tion? More importantly, why did Buhari ‘commission’ the Dangote refinery when he knew that the crude oil to be refined is not available because he, Buhari, had used the crude oil to borrow money through the numerous forward sale agreements his government executed? The information in the public space is that Buhari executed seven solid forward sale agreements, which entails that he borrowed money and pledged our crude oil as payment. That will run for several years. Nobody has disputed that; nobody is also asking Buhari any question.
Tinubu’s government, it was also said, pledged our crude oil as payment for the $3.3 billion Afrexim Bank loan that he took in August 2023, barely three months after he assumed office. The government has not countered that either. Now, if it is true that Dangote needs about 650,000 barrels of crude oil daily to run his refin-ery, and the NNPCL has just 200,000 barrels of crude oil per day left, how would the Dangote Refinery get the products to refine? The problem is bigger than that, any-way. Last December, the government Vuvuzelas told us that the Port Harcourt Refinery was almost ready. When eventually that one comes alive, are we going to import crude oil for the refinery?
When I say Dangote refinery must not die, I mean every alphabet of that statement. President Tinubu has the sole responsibility of ensuring that the crisis is resolved. The emotional blackmail by Aliko Dangote of his willingness to sell his shares of the refinery is very immaterial. Neverthe-less, the death of Dangote Refinery, by any means, is a huge negative for this government. As it stands today, I doubt if any serious investor would want to put his money into this economy.
What the government should do, is exactly what the Nigerian Tribune suggested in its Editorial of yesterday, Monday, July 29, 2024, under the title: “The Dangote Refinery Issue.” The Editorial reads in part thus: “To be sure, we do not make light of regulatory issues. Regardless of the acclaimed state of the Dangote Refinery and the position of Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest business-man, in the scheme of things, the law remains the law and ought to be enforced to the letter. The problem is that in this case, there has been no clarity on the actual offence(s) committed by the business in question…..
It is a no-brainer that a facility such as the Dangote Refinery, Nigeria’s only functional refinery at the moment, ought not to be trashed by the Nigerian government, particularly given its rhetoric about recovering the Nigerian economy from the current morass… While we make absolutely no comment about the alleged political underpinnings of the dispute between the Dangote Group and the Federal Government, we are constrained by the lessons of the past to issue a serious warning over the age-long, pernicious practice of destroying local investments and eroding the business climate for partisan reasons.”
Let Tinubu continue to whistle while scraping the back of the blind man’s roast-yam. If not for any other thing, but for the sake of thousands of Nigerians who would be thrown back to the labour market should Dangote Refinery die, and the millions of other dependants that will suffer, President Tinubu must show ultimate courage and do everything that is right under the laws to preserve the Dangote refinery.
This is the only way any other person would put his money in our economy.
