There is a big question over the actual figure of the daily petrol consumption in the country as the petrol subsidy bill mounts. The Federal Government has just approved N3 trillion to cover subsidy spending in 2022 and the bill always increases on a yearly basis which suggests that there is more about it than meets the eye. In the subsidy debacle that the nation has found itself, the Federal Government has played an ignoble role and it is funny that the government is almost making it look as if the situation that Nigeria has found itself was caused by the people rather than the government itself.
First, it would have been easy to remove the subsidy if petrol was being refined locally, which means that there won’t be shipping costs and other foreign taxes to be paid before the product arrives in the country. However, it is the same Federal Government that has been unable to make its four refineries work for decades. Although the nation’s refineries have a combined refining capacity of 445,000 barrels of oil, when was the last time they refined a barrel of oil? The fact is that the Buhari administration has been in government for about seven years, so what stopped it from making the refineries work after all these years? Second, the high daily consumption figure, some say it is 65 million litres per day, looks questionable and from the government’s own body language, there is a lot of smuggling of the product going on across the nation’s borders with neighbouring countries. But who is supposed to police the borders? Customs of course; and what are the customs officers doing at the borders to stem the flow of smuggled petrol from Nigeria into neighbouring countries? If smuggling of petrol across the borders is so high, what has the Federal Government done to reduce it to the barest minimum. Of course, smugglers could devise several means to do their nefarious business, but the onus is on the Federal Government agency in charge of manning the borders to checkmate them.
The reality is that if we assume for the purpose of this debate that the nation loses 15 million litres of petrol daily through smuggling, it means the government is paying billions monthly as subsidy for petrol not consumed in Nigeria, with smugglers laughing all the way to the bank. However, nobody is being held responsible for the malfeasance at the border.