Drip drip dry
The lorry drivers that carry petrol around the country are on strike. Lagos has almost dried up. In Abuja, there are hundreds of boys selling black market fuel out of jerry cans. The cost per litre has rocketed from N70 to N250. The roads are eerily quiet. How perverse in a country drenched in hydrocarbons! When will this country get its act together? Surely just one or two of the billions of dollars in the Federal reserve can be used to build a new refinery to serve the local market..
Of course, its not as simple as it seems, because a functioning refinery eats into the huge racket that is the petrol import business. Until the vested interests behind this cartel system are challenged, building refineries will achieve nothing. Its the same with the power sector: until those that make vast sums selling generators and diesel are challenged, Nigeria's measly peasly 900MW output will continue to shrink. Compare and contrast with Ghana, with a fraction of the population, producing nearly double the daily output, let alone South Africa, with around 50 times the power production of the sleeping giant of Africa.
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2 comments:
I think you summed up the dilemma of Nigeria being an on-going under acheiver in various spheres of development. Our brothers in Ghana are eclipsing us (and unintentionally shaming us), South Africa have left Nigeria to slumber in the starting blocks, whilst they tear away.
Yet in Nigeria, a significant few are successfully hampering the lives of the many.
Question is "when o when?" Will the government be able to exercise enough control to curtail the mafias (responsible for holding the nation to ransom) and reach an acceptable agreement with the oil-producing states?
It is facts like these that allow Nigeria to be disrespected, and one can't say too much in defense because in the main it is true, how sad :-(
Deafening silence on this topic, no?
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