Tell Magazine

By Josephine Efe-Akarue

Truth can be brutal, yet therapeutic. This is one reason why the public hopes that truth will emerge from the just concluded Senate probe on the petroleum subsidy scheme. More importantly, that it will not be another talk-shop or smokescreen.

When it comes to public issues, Nigerians have little faith in probes. We often perceive them as comic reliefs to assuage anger or dramatic distractions with communiqués that get conveniently lost in some dusty archives or the dark recessives of our minds. The reality is that Nigerians are tired of shams and half-truths that are paraded as real.

Our survival as a nation depends on it. A people cannot survive as a nation when there is a great disconnect between the government and the governed or when people feel their pain is simply a semi-colon in the longer paragraph of their national history.

Indeed, even before the Senate Committee on Petroleum Resources began the fuel subsidy probe, Nigerians already felt they were being taken for a ride. Besides President Goodluck Jonathan’s argument that fuel subsidy had become unsustainable since it cost the nation some N1.3 trillion in 2011, no one has bothered to explain how we got this figure in the first place. No one is explaining how subsidy rose from N623 billion in 2010 to the N1.7 trillion quoted by Lamido Sanusi, the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, governor, It took a nationwide protest that cost the nation much more than we were trying to save for the Senate Joint Committee to take a closer look at the oil sector. Even so, the absence of reliable data at the hearings implied that someone is either being economical with the truth or reading the same script from a different page; like two Siamese twins sleeping on the same bed and dreaming different dreams.

In addressing the total cost of the 2011 fuel subsidy for instance, Diezani Alison-Madueke, minister of petroleum, said it was N1.4 trillion as opposed to the finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s N1.3 trillion, and Sanusi’s N1.7 trillion. Given the strategic portfolios of each of these personalities, who do Nigerians take as presenting the truth?

Similarly, at the hearings, Nigeria’s daily petroleum consumption rate stood at figures which were dependent on who was giving the answers. Alison-Madueke for example said it was 52 million litres; Austen Oniwon, group managing director, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, 35 million litres; the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Authority, PPPRA, 24 million litres; the finance minister, 40 million litres.

The inconsistencies and conflicting figures create the impression that truth is up for sale. It makes it difficult to build a convincing case to the public on the need to make sacrifices to purge the rot in the system through fuel price deregulation. It creates a problem of credibility when issues that concern our collective destiny become reduced to a game of numbers. Even an enquiry on the audit report on the Nigerian oil industry carried out by KPMG, an audit firm, produced unclear answers. The questions Nigerians seek answers to are not many. Stripped of all adjectives, they stand on one

point: Does our survival as a nation depend on government’s deregulation of fuel price?

If we do not have answers on the production capacity of our local refineries, for instance, how can we know if we are doing well or not on the economic scale? When government officials give conflicting figures on the amount paid out as subsidy to marketers, how can they justify even with the best of intentions, the deregulation of petroleum price before the masses? During the hearings, we got to know that there is really no such thing as a subsidy account. At best, the petroleum minister refers to it is a virtual account, just as the NNPC says there is no such account in existence as the lay man will look at it. The PPPRA says the account is a technical one and the CBN governor says no subsidy account exists with it.  But the finance minister says it exists but not with a bank. So whose word do we take as the truth?

Perhaps we would simply have resigned our fate to chance if all at stake were a mere difference in opinion. But the implications run much deeper.

Amidst all the claims, counterclaims and buck-passing, we have become more confused. We still need to know why Nigeria prefers to export its crude to fixing its refineries; why we prefer to export only to import at a higher cost for the refined product. What will happen if for once, we look inwards and tell ourselves the hard truth that we do not need to send out our crude for refining when we can do it here? What will happen if the key players get to know that it is no longer business as usual, but business with integrity and due diligence? What if our children ask us tomorrow why they are paying for the crude they never got to benefit from? We may never know. Our collective destinies rest on one thing: Truth. Shall it ever emerge?

(Efe-Akarue writes from Babcock University, Ilishan-Remo, Ogun State, Nigeria where she works as deputy director of external and community affairs)