A
former Minister of Petroleum, Prof. Tam David-West, speaks about his
misgivings against the running of the petroleum ministry, corruption and
sundry other national issues in this interview with AKINWALE ABOLUWADE
You have been criticising the Minister of Petroleum, what is the point of disagreement?
When you are assessing your colleagues
after you, you are also in another context putting yourself on the line
to be assessed. Of course, we are public officers and public officers
must open themselves up for assessment by anybody. The assessment should
be constructive and should help the system. I don’t talk to press and I
don’t write anything without praying to God to guide me. My prayer has
always been very simple. I thank God for granting me the talent of
social analysis and commentary. I thank God for that blessing. I pray to
God to direct my thoughts and pen, my words and actions. Whatever I am
going to use the talent for must glorify God’s name and contribute
positively to the system. If God directs me and people are not happy
with what I have said and they are annoyed I have no apologies. I know
Diezani (Alison-Madueke) for as long as she was working for Shell. I
know her father too. But I am not happy with her stewardship, not based
on my own time as a benchmark, but based on what I know. What is good
everybody knows is good. Diezani should consider what I am saying
constructively. Every human being is the best judge of himself. You know
your weaknesses and strengths more than anybody else. The industry, as
it is, is terrible. As I have always said, any minister or government
that cannot manage the Nigerian oil industry well is a failure. Over 90
per cent of the money Nigeria has abroad is from oil. Oil makes about 85
per cent of our budget. Diezani is free to say whatever she likes about
me. The public will judge. One of her problems is that I don’t think
she does her job faithfully. She did not prepare herself well for the
task of a petroleum minister. I became the minister with the background
of a virologist. I didn’t know anything about oil. I never met
(Maj.-Gen. Muhammadu) Buhari before he appointed me and he had been a
petroleum minister before me. Buhari is a brilliant person. He can match
many professors. What I did was that I first understudied him. I got a
lot of instructions from him. Then the heads of the oil companies in the
country became my personal friends. Mobil, Shell and a number of them
became personal friends and not drinking friends; the ones I can ask for
guidance. From them, I gained a lot. I also asked questions to
cross-check from members of my staff. I discussed with the Nigerian
National Petroleum Corporation as if it was a seminar in the university.
I didn’t take oil policies to the government without informing the oil
companies that ‘this is what I want to do, what is your position?’ They
will make their input. So, I never brought in a policy in which there
was a friction. For example, the flaring of gas: Government after
government had said that oil companies should stop flaring gas. During
(President Shehu) Shagari’s time, the FG said if they flared gas, the
government would seize their licence. They could not be threatened; they
said if they stopped flaring gas, they would stop production. Now, the
Federal Government made a political policy without studying the science
behind it. There is no place where they do oil drilling and they don’t
flare gas. I have been to the Gulf, I travelled extensively in Saudi
Arabia, they flare gas. The rationale is to consult before making a
policy. The policy will affect not only Nigerians, but also the
operators. They are very vital; so, we don’t have to antagonise them
just as we don’t have to pamper them. We must bring them on board
whenever we want to make a policy that will affect them. What I did was
that I sent Mr. Green (an engineer) and two others to go round the oil
producing areas. They brought the record of all the gas flaring fields.
There are three types of oil wells. For the first, they must flare gas
if they must drill oil, if you tell them to stop flaring it means you
are telling them to stop drilling oil and the Nigerian economy will
collapse. They can also re-inject. We identified the fields where they
must flare and gave them authority to flare. Where they can afford not
to flare there is an alternative for re-injection. But, we fined them by
calculating how many cubic of gas they flared. It is not easy to tell
the oil companies that you want to fine them. I called a meeting and
told them the government knows they must flare gas but in those areas
where they can inject without flaring gas, we will fine them if they
flare gas. I knew the names of the directors of the oil companies at the
time, so at meetings, I would call them by their first names and we
would discuss. I would joke with them. The policy was approved by the
oil companies. Nigeria needs the oil companies. All of them complied
before I left. During Shagari’s administration, the policy could not
stand so they reneged. But this time, the policy went through with an
approval. If I didn’t bring them on board they would give me problems
and I needed them. All of them complied till I left.
Under Diezani, they make the oil
companies look as if they are enemies. Even the Senate president said
the oil companies should not threaten us. Diezani is brilliant, I am a
virologist and she is an architect. The oil minister of Saudi Arabia was
in the position for 25 years. He is a lawyer. So, it is not your field
that matters but how God guides you to use it. But there is too much
corruption in the oil sector in Nigeria.
Some people wonder why you are not satisfied with the performances of your successors in the petroleum ministry.
If I take a job, I will give it my all.
Why I am complaining is that I know where they are failing. They
sometimes have not been able to resist personal interests. If you are
doing that type of job and you have a tinge of personal interest, you
have failed. One contract of oil can make you a multi-millionaire in
dollars. Many people have not been able to resist this. Now, they are
talking about local content. It is good for Nigerians but they should
not glamorise it. When I was minister, I told the oil companies that
they could not remove a white person, whose tenure has expired, from a
position and replace him with another white man. You must check with me
if there is no Nigerian that is suitable to fill the vacant position. It
is a good policy and Buhari approved it but it was later cancelled by
another administration.
You have always insisted that the Federal Government’s subsidy is a fluke. What prove have you?
I challenged President Goodluck Jonathan
and all his ministers to a public debate on oil subsidy, but they
refused to take the challenge. I have the facts that there is no
subsidy, Buhari and the late Chief Gani Fawehinmi said there was no
subsidy. Fawehinmi wrote a pamphlet on it. Oil subsidy is all a fraud.
At a Gani Fawehinmi lecture, I said the amount the Federal Government
would get from oil subsidy was like an amoeba that is always changing
shape. The government gave 10 different figures that we could get, so we
know it doesn’t exist. They will bring fuel from Port Harcourt to Lagos
and say it is imported. It is fraud and the navy has proved it. If any
government delights in making life difficult for the people, God will
punish them. In every society, the poor are more in number than the
rich. Let the government’s policy be directed towards alleviating the
suffering of the masses. If you develop a policy against the masses, you
are going against God. They had a conference in Lagos on subsidy. They
did not invite me; they avoided me because they would be exposed.
Petrol should not sell for more than N40
per litre. After my calculation, a professor of petroleum (a Nigerian
based in Texas) sent an article to the media, saying petroleum should
not cost more than N35 per litre. They are lying.
Do you agree with the objectives of the Subsidy Reinvestment programme of the FG?
SUREP is a fraud. How can you invest
what you don’t have? You are going to put money into that project from
other sources. They have not invested well. They just used the SURE
Project as a palliative for Nigerians. They are getting money for the
SURE project by punishing the people. It is all propaganda. They said
they were going to have millions of work, but they have nothing because
the premise is wrong and faulty. I said there is no subsidy on technical
grounds. It is callous – what do you have the international price for?
You don’t need any international price because the oil was given to us
by God. We have refineries and why don’t you drill the oil? Get the
product you want to consume into the refineries, refine and sell at the
filling stations. So, forget about the international price. But they
increased the price and punished the people. They sabotage the
refineries by making them moribund. As I am talking to you, no Nigerian
refinery is working up to 30 per cent capacity. By this, they create an
artificial problem and start to import fuel. We are drilling and there
are four refineries but all of them are having problems. The vital parts
of the refineries are destroyed.
Don’t you think it is the system that is supporting the illegality?
We can link the problem to poor value
system. You cannot do that during the Buhari administration. But what is
happening now is that when the leadership cannot address the issue,
people will take chances because they know they can get away with it. A
former petroleum minister has a filling station and he attends oil
marketers’ meeting. He is no longer a minister but a marketer.
Should the President have the sole power to approve licence for oil blocks?
One of the things that I have against
Diezani is that the petroleum minister in Nigeria has a lot of power
even before my time. The Petroleum Industry Bill gives the minister more
powers that he can award and revoke any contract without recourse to
anybody. It is crazy to put all the livewire of a country in the hands
of one person. The minister should not have all that power. At the
National Assembly, Diezani’s argument defeated her. She mentioned
Malaysia and Norway as countries where the oil ministers have so much
power. A minister that uses Malaysia and Norway to justify a policy in
the oil sector is an ignorant minister. Why don’t you use Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait and Venezuela, who are big players in the oil industry? What is
the role of Malaysia in the global oil market? She didn’t use the
appropriate examples.
How well is Jonathan’s administration faring in terms of touching the lives of Nigerians?
If Jonathan is thinking that the
Nigerian economy is doing well, I am sorry for him. I criticise him to
put him right. What will I derive by criticising a president that is
doing well? If I do, I will ridicule myself. Unfortunately for Jonathan,
his advisers are not fair to him. Machiavelli in his book, The Prince,
said, “For the prince or leader to be wisely advised, he also should be
wise in the first place.” What is wrong with Jonathan is that he takes
hook, line and sinker whatever he is told. He is a PhD holder, who
should be grounded in the methodology of investigation. He listens to
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as if she is a repository of wisdom. How do you
judge that your economy has gone up? Is it by how much you have in your
foreign reserve? That is nonsense. It is like saying you have money in
your bank account and still complaining that you are hungry. There is
poverty in the land but the President is comfortable with getting an
approval for N1bn food money to feed himself and his deputy in a year.
Are their stomachs digesting rocks? He should be very careful and know
that God is not asleep and there is nothing that touches God than the
cries of the poor. Any leader that makes the poor people unhappy should
be very careful.
How do you assess infrastructural development under this administration?
What infrastructure? What is the cause
of the grouse between Jonathan and Governor Rotimi Amaechi? It is the
East-West Road. It is very bad. Sometimes you pay someone to push your
car on that road. Jonathan and his minister for Niger Delta abused
Amaechi and painted the governor in bad light. No infrastructure.
Education is finished.
The National Assembly members were
accused of collecting so much money as salaries but they passed the
buck to the executive. How do you react to this?
It is nonsense. What they are saying is
that my neighbour is a thief so I must be a thief. Why can’t you correct
your neighbours? Were they not the ones that approved the salaries for
the executive? But the economy is suffering. Someone wrote in The Sun
that a senator in Nigeria can employ four Barrack Obama, the American
President. It shows we are not serious. The economy is down. When it
comes to helping themselves at the expense of the poor, they do it.
President Jonathan has 10 presidential jets and two are still coming at
the state’s expense. The Prime Minister of Britain goes in public
transport. He has no fleet.
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