‘Civil servants connived with politicians to kill Nigeria’s refineries’
Adeleke Adedipe, chief operating officer of LEKOIL Nigeria Limited, has garnered over 35 years of experience in Nigeria’s oil and gas sector, during which he held various managerial positions at Shell Nigeria where he was also a pioneering general manager, corporate security, retiring in 2010. In this interview with NATHANIEL AKHIGBE, the petroleum engineer x-rays the challenges in the Nigerian oil and gas sector, particularly the comatose condition of the nation’s refineries and what the government must do to revive the refineries. Excerpts:
As a stakeholder in Nigeria’s oil and gas sector, could you give us an overview of the sector?
The Nigerian oil sector can be classified into three groups: the upstream, the downstream, and the mainstream. The upstream means exploration and production companies, the downstream are the people who sell petroleum products, and you can put the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas as mainstream. That’s in a very broad sense in terms of where products are. You can also classify it in two broad groups of oil producing companies and oil servicing companies. So, it depends on which element you are looking at.
Some Nigerians are of the view that oil discovery and exploration have been a curse rather than a blessing to Nigeria. Do you agree with this view?
Truly speaking, that is where I differ from many Nigerians. It is not the fault of the oil industry, but rather, it is the fault of those who have managed the economy, those who transformed it from a multi-product economy to a mono-product economy. That is the point I am trying to make. Basically, oil and gas in Nigeria provides more than 80 percent of Nigeria’s earnings. That tells you that oil and gas is contributing immensely to the Nigerian economy. The industry itself cannot be said to have negative impact on the economy. However, the manner in which the proceeds of oil and gas in Nigerian have been used has negative impact on the economy. Again, you can say the things that have happened to the oil and gas industry, like militancy and vandalism, have negatively affected the economy in the sense that they have reduced Nigeria’s production, which translates into the revenue of the nation.
There have been allegations of corruption against Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), with many Nigerians labelling it the ATM of any sitting government. What’s your position?
Again, I will slightly differ in that generalisation. The NNPC as it is known now was not a den of corruption from inception; saying that would mean not giving due recognition to the founding fathers of the corporation, people like Engineer M.O. Feyide, the first Nigerian to be OPEC secretary; Chief Festus Marinho, who used to be the first MD of the then Nigerian National Oil Corporation that served as the forerunner of the NNPC, etc. These men and women were not corrupt people. The issue of NNPC becoming an ATM of corruption, as you call it, started not too long ago; it didn’t start from inception. We must make a distinction between what we have now and the founding fathers who were not corrupt people.
So, in what fundamental ways has NNPC of today deviated from what the founding fathers did?
The fundamental deviation between those founding fathers and the current reality is the lack of patriotism. The founding fathers of NNPC had patriotic inclinations; they believed in the general good. But in recent dispensation, from 10 to 20 years ago, many of the people who have passed through the leadership of the NNPC were not men and women who had the common good as their orientation.
After many years of oil exploration and exploitation, the country is still importing refined petroleum products. Nigeria still cannot refine its crude oil for local consumption.
Without standing in defence of those who have run NNPC in recent times, I would want to say the way NNPC functions will depend solely on the government it’s serving; that is the crux of the matter. The issue is the executive arm of government that controls NNPC’s functionalities. If it is wrong, NNPC itself will be wrong because the directive that will be passed to the NNPC will be wrong directives. When I was young, Nigeria was producing petrol, diesel and kerosene that it could consume. In subsequent years, when Obasanjo came to power in 1999, what was his first lament? His first lament was that the refineries he built in his first coming were still the refineries in Nigeria, and they were in a comatose situation. So, we need to ask ourselves: what happened since the last refinery was commissioned and now? And I can answer that question. What has happened to us is that corruption has taken a new dimension in Nigeria’s body politic; it is not just about stealing money or people inflating contracts, people are saying they are doing turnaround maintenance that never took place. Corruption even exists in the way our people think. My father once told me 50 years ago before he died 45 years ago that the way the soldiers were leading us, they would eventually lead us to a comatose situation. It was as if the man was a prophet. That is why today, the average Nigerian does not think straight anymore.
What do you mean when you say the average Nigerian does not think straight anymore?
Let me tell you what I mean. I am an Akure man. Akure people have never given me a civic reception and yet there are things that I have done as an Akure man. As a student, I was a member of the executive of Akure Students Union (ASU) that metamorphosed into the youth wing of the then Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN). Today, if Buhari calls me and makes me minister for petroleum, I can guarantee you that Akure people will organise a civic reception for me, and the first thing they will tell me is, ‘Leke, this is our time’. And the question you ask yourself is: what does that mean? It means, ‘This is our time to snooker Nigeria’. When I read the hansard of the House of Representatives between 1954 and 1959 when my father was a member of the House, and when I compare the quality of the discussion that my father and the likes of Obafemi Awolowo, Tafawa Balewa, Michael Adekunle Ajasin, etc had in the House of Representatives between 1954 and 1959, I don’t see that quality in today’s National Assembly.
So, how do we get out of this ‘national thinking deficiency, taking into cognizance that we have a National Orientation Agency?
The issue is each of us, in our small cubicle, must decide as an individual that we will not be part of the current system. That is why when my good friend Lai Mohammed says in the orientation, ‘Change begins with me’, I support it. But it is more than a slogan; people have to be made to pay for their misdemeanour. We must get to that point where, whether the person is from Akure or Abuja or wherever he comes from, once it is firmly established beyond doubt that he or she has snookered Nigeria, everybody must condemn him or her. But what do we find in Nigeria today? If an Akure man commits a crime, the first thing you hear is, ‘Omon wa ni’ (‘He is our child’); ‘don’t touch him’. That we saw in the case of Diepreye Alamieyeseigha of Bayelsa when he snookered them, took their money and jumped bail in the UK. He came to Nigeria and everybody applauded him, including people who went to the same university with me, telling me, ‘What is your problem? Is it not Bayelsa’s money he stole?’ Can you imagine that! James Ibori is serving a jail term in the UK and people are putting paid adverts for him and saying he is their ‘godfather’. Godfather for what! Until people begin to see sacred cows being punished adequately, there will be no change. Change is not only by slogan. Until you punish wrongdoers, there will be no change in the hearts of men. Nigerians are not more criminal than Europeans and Americans. But what is the difference? The difference is that a European who wants to commit a crime will think three times if not 10 times before he goes to commit the crime; a Nigerian who wants to commit a crime doesn’t even think half time. Reason: he knows that there are 9 out of 10 chances that he would not be caught. When he is caught, there are 8 out of 10 chances that he will not be convicted. But the Englishman who wants to commit crime will think several times because he knows that there are 8 out of 10 chances he would be caught and punished. That is the difference. I travel overseas quite often. When you see Nigerians boarding a plane at Charles De Gaulle Airport, London Heathrow, JF Kennedy, etc, they line up and behave like human beings, as soon as they step onto the soil of Nigeria, what you see are chaos and disorderliness. The difference is that the environment they are coming from has enforcement of orderliness.
Let’s return to the oil industry. There are conflicting reports at the moment on the state of Nigerian refineries. Even the minister of state for petroleum appears not to know exactly. Do you have any idea what the situation is?
If the man at the helm of the affairs cannot tell us about the true condition of the refineries, how do you expect me, an outsider, to know what is happening there?
I asked the question because as a stakeholder, you may be hearing things that I’m not hearing. Shouldn’t you be interested in what is happening to the refineries?
One of the fundamental challenges we have in Nigeria is the Nigerian civil servants and workers. What Nigerian workers should go on rampage for, they don’t! The reality is that if you ask those who are managing the refineries about the state of the refineries, they cannot tell you. Why? Because the bulk of the people are involved in the corruption. There is what we call ‘CYA’ (cover your arse). When Mr T1 comes to know the state of the refineries at this time, they will cover their arse by telling one story; when Mr T2 comes the next time, they will tell another story. So, when you compare the reports of T1 and T2, they are different; there is no consistency. How can a government department take money on behalf of government and not put it in government’s coffers?
If the FG cannot tell Nigerians the true state of the nation’s refineries, isn’t that a mark of irresponsibility?
We can point accusing fingers at Kachikwu, but he has only been at the helms for less than two years, and we are talking about something that has been perpetuated for over 20 years. You will need people outside of that system who understand the industry to come in there in critical mass, with men who have change-agent mentality to be able to unravel the problem. So taking Ibe Kachikwu there alone and leaving the people who perpetuated the mess intact is like asking the camel to pass through the eye of a needle. Our major problem is civil servants conniving with those who milk Nigeria to bleed the country dry. Civil servants killed the Nigerian refineries.
What’s the way out?
The way out of this will involve pain. Don’t let us deceive ourselves; if as Nigerians we don’t want to endure pain, we will not get out of this. Let me explain myself. Right now, the revenue that comes from crude oil as our revenue source is low and there are issues to be tackled. Therefore, if we as a nation want to get out of this, we need to put the current refineries in top shape. There are aspects of government that will suffer; and then as a people, we must be ready to face that hardship. The other day I heard one of my neighbours saying we must allow importation of rice for the price of the commodity to come down. But the more we continue to allow rice to come in, the more difficult it will be for us to grow our own rice. I am just drawing that parallel between petroleum products and rice because rice is food that people eat and petroleum products are what people need to move from place to place. So, we must as a people know that we can’t eat our cake and have it. Nigerians are used to so many years of lies that when they meet a man who is saying the truth, that man becomes the evil man. That is the current reality in which we have found ourselves in Nigeria. If we are going to make the existing refineries work and build new ones that will be able to produce what we consume, there are other aspects of the economy that will suffer and we must be ready for that suffering.
What are these aspects of the economy that must suffer for Nigerian refineries to work optimally?
You are a father and a husband. If BusinessDay cuts your salary from N100 to N45 today, the things you had in mind to do last month with N100, will you still pursue the same things now? No! If you were eating three times a day before, now you will cut it to two times, which means you are now short of one meal. Is that not a type of suffering? What I am saying is that we want to develop transportation, we want to develop other sectors, but the resources are limited. Therefore, as a nation, we can say in the next two years, what we will face will be to develop agriculture so that our people can have something to eat and we will face our refineries. Therefore, other things will change. Nigerian government and people must face the things that are necessary, not the things that are nice to have.
In other words, are you saying there is hope of clearing the age-long mess in the sector and rescuing the refineries?
The hope is that there are Nigerians who have knowledge, both inside and outside the country. Bring them in, give them a free hand to do what is required, and I can tell you the refineries will bounce back. And then, we should give licences for new refineries for people who actually want to build refineries, not people who want to be port executives. That is the crux of the matter. The first refinery in Nigeria was built by Shell-PB. I feel ashamed and embarrassed that Nigeria cannot boast of working refineries today.
The multinational oil companies no longer seem interested in refineries business in Nigeria. Why is this so?
What happened was that in the name of nationalism, because of the problem the British government had at that time, we nationalised the BP equity in Shell-PB, and then nationalised the refineries. Then it came into the hands of Nigerian workers who are not properly monitored. When Shell-BP was running the refineries, there was no problem. Where is Nigerian Airways today? Who killed it? Nigerian civil servants and workers did. They would put their children on flight aboard the airways to London and would not pay under the guise that it is part of their perks of office? But when you place a political appointee who is going to spend a maximum of eight years in office on life pension and you say a civil servant can only qualify for pension entitlements after spending a minimum of 15-30 years in service, why would there not be corruption in the civil service? These are the things Nigerian workers should fight for. It is injustice.
Not long ago the FG hiked the price of petrol, but many Nigerians are still not sure whether it was subsidy removal or price increment, and now there is a rumour that further increment may be on the way. Could you shed some light on this?
What happened was a modulated deregulation. But the issue of whether government deregulates or not is not the debate for me; what the government has done is that to say if you want to bring your petroleum, bring it. But based on the market forces at that time, they came to a reasonable understanding that you should not sell it above N145. That is a modulated deregulation. Government has responsibility to the citizenry to moderate the price. But since part of the mechanism is the market forces, are we going to say we will not allow the market forces to act? For me, that is the debate.
The Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) has been in the National Assembly since time immemorial, and even the 8th NASS is not saying anything about it. What do you think is the problem?
Ask the Senate president and the Speaker of the House of Representatives. That’s what I’m talking about; that’s what Nigerian workers should go on rampage for. How can a bill be in the National Assembly and this is the third or fourth president and yet, the bill has not been passed? Your guess is as good as mine.
If you were president of Nigeria, what would you do differently in managing the country’s oil sector?
I will put square pegs in square holes, and there are many of them all over the world who are Nigerians, men of kindred spirit, men who believe that corruption must be wiped out. If we don’t bring such men and women here, whatever we are doing is an exercise in futility.
NATHANIEL AKHIGBE