The cartels and us

Whereas elsewhere in the world, the public space is dominated by debates on good governance, the quality of life, human and resource management for the greatest good of the greatest number, the public space is dominated by the riveting exploits of highly-placed thieves and their loot. The Nigerian story is often better than fiction. It is difficult to find fiction that approaches some of the unconscionable and cynical exploits of the distinguished treasury looters. If a country cannot debate where it is, where it wishes to go and how it intends to get there, the minds of its are stultified and progressively atrophy, leaving in its wake the avarice and the venality that more or less now define us.

The Nigerian president can actually afford to be nothing more than a performance president. He does not have to think or plan; all he has to do is listen to and respond to what people are saying about the country in a manner that does not task his brain. After all, what do we expect from our president and governors? Roads, potable water and schools, right? Toss the money to Julius Berger and the other big time contractors. I wish to suggest that if we do not wean ourselves from these elementary obligations of government to the governed, the quality of governance will remain poor and devoid of anything intellectual. We are expanding the room for charlatans in the corridors of power.

Since Major Nzeogwu alerted us to the menace of the 10 per centers in his fiery rhetoric of January 15, 1966, public opinion has recruited every Nigerian leader into the fight against corruption. All we want them to do is to perform by laying the cane across the back of corruption with grandiloquent and lofty promises. If you check the records, you would see that no Nigerian leader has failed to perform in this regard. Strong and condemnatory rhetoric on corruption has always dominated our public space along with, you guessed it, the occasional parade of thieves in high and low places.

The success of corruption in defeating every measure intended to defeat it or to use the more correct word, eradicate it, has nothing to do with the resilience of corruption or the ineffectiveness of those measures. It has everything to do with the fact that you cannot kill the beetle when you feed the beetle. A bit of a crude analogy there but I am sure you do get the drift of my argument. Far be it from me to belittle the current efforts by the Buhari administration. But given the depth of the rot and the national culture that has grown around thieving and looting as both right and smart, the man needs a couple of life times to despatch corruption to hell.

Corruption has the audacity to stick its fingers in your face. More worrisome is the fact that we have so far not numbered cartels among our enemies. They are the real saboteurs of our national development. Their corruptive influence is comprehensive. There are three of these powerful cartels, namely, the oil cartel, the energy cartel and the food import cartel.

Each of these cartels holds the country in the jugular. They are the invisible faces in the running of the economy. Their hands are in all the pies in government. I know no instance of any one of our leaders confronting the cartels head on.

Take the oil cartel. Nigeria is a net exporter of crude oil. It was once rated as number four in the world. I think Angola now occupies that important space. Good for them. What we cannot understand is why Nigeria is a net importer of refined petroleum products. At regular intervals the cartel induces scarcity of these products and forces us to pay more. A fuel subsidy regime was put in place to make us pay less because we found the sentiment to explain this away. The citizens of an oil producing country should pay less for fuel than citizens of non-oil producing countries.

It made some sense and was well-intentioned. But the oil cartel turned it into a ruse. The cartel turned up a new breed of fuel importers called independent fuel importers. These recruited men and women know nothing about the industry; still, government routinely issued them with fuel import licences. They get paid the subsidy and we, the supposed beneficiaries were cynical denied our little entitlement. After so many years of the fuel subsidy regime, this administration has the courage to end it. But do not think this is the end of the road for the cartel. No sir.

To ensure the continued importation of fuel at their behest, this cartel has consistently and systematically sabotaged our four oil refiners. The condition of the refineries tells you everything you would ever want to know about our oil industry and the power of the oil cartel.

The energy cartel is the generator-importing cartel. This is the very powerful cartel that sabotages regular or uninterrupted power supply in the country. For years, this cartel has systematically and consistently sabotaged all efforts made by successive governments to give us steady power supply. And so, here we are: a country of 170 million people generates a miserable, scandalous and shameful 4,000 megawatts. If you recall that in 1984/85 we generated 2,500 megawatts, you would appreciate the destructive power of this cartel and for how long it has held the country hostage to its corruption and rapacity.

In a perverse way, without the generator merchants it could be worse. These evil merchants have something for every demographic segment of the society in their generator needs. Those right down the economic ladder and who can manage to put two or three thousand Naira together are entitled to the little, noisy generators called, tongue in the cheek, I-pass-my-neighbour. All companies in the country own two or even three generators just to keep their business humming along.

In 2007, Vanguard newspaper did a comprehensive report on the cost of fuelling these generators. It came up with some scary figures in trillions of Naira spent by individuals and companies just to have light in their offices and homes. You can see that the federal budget each year has a vote for fuelling generators in Aso Rock. You need not wait for hell to freeze over to know why NEPA is NEPA.

The fuel cartel and the energy cartel are evil twins and are mutually supportive of their evil designs on our country. This is as messy as they come. The same men drive the two cartels. The fuel importer is the also invariably the generator importer – and vice-versa. See how they manipulate the system and keep our country in suspended animation? It boggles the mind.

The food cartel is no less vicious. We have 80 per cent of arable land in the country. Every part of this country supports both domestic and commercial agriculture. But the food cartel sabotages our agriculture and has consistently kept it at peasant level to ensure that our country remains dependent on imported food, meat and dairy products. Our food import bill nudges the trillion Naira mark. Yet, every Nigerian leader has been recruited by public opinion over the years to make generous promises on agricultural development. Ordinarily, the inability of the giant of Africa to feed itself would be shameful and scandalous but the giant of Africa is immune to shame and scandal.

These cartels are the country’s mafia. The real corruption in the country is in these cartels. They run a parallel government. Even the removal of the fuel subsidy was done on terms favourable to the fuel cartel. As long as they thrive, so long would the fight against corruption be a performance act at the instance of public opinion. And our public space would continue to be dominated by the mind-boggling exploits of big thieves and small thieves and their loot. A country such as ours should have much better luck than this.