By Kach Umuagu
The easiest way to get people to give up all resistance and do what you require or follow your way of thinking, is to simply introduce some unsavoury event into their lives. This will then be the ruse under which you resurrect your prior rejected plan and everyone would suddenly see how wise you were to have had the foresight to have tried to implement it in the first place and then they would gladly fall in line.
Let me bring the point home.
Barely a month after the whole populace in Nigeria that are not oil marketers, government nor politicians or political office holders, jointly rallied to warn the government not to increase the pump price of premium motor spirit through the removal of shady subsidy,
there is suddenly a scarcity of fuel in the two major commercial cities of the country, Lagos and Abuja.
Fuel prices have skyrocketed as a result with a resultant change in transport fares. This has been reported by various print media outlets as the result of the importation of pms with high sulphur content.
To be honest, anyone in this country that feels this is just coincidental needs some serious rethink. I have since come to the conclusion that there is nothing coincidental in Nigeria. Events happen and are always orchestrated behind the scenes and then left to play out to a pre-planned conclusion.
Let me give you an example.
Let’s say a chairman of an estate wants to increase the number of day guards that watch over the estate and has pushed for this and has been met with swift rebuke and push back from the residents who feel they already pay enough for security and require security more at night than during the day and feel that the chairman and the financial secretary (the one who goes round and collects the security money monthly) are not accountable anyway and overinflate figures for anything else they use the money to do.
What does the smart chairman do?
Wait for a perfect opportunity of a security breach, with residents in the estate affected and then call for a meeting that the estate has never had prior and push his agenda of employing more day guards as he proposed before and because emotions are running high the residents willingly agree.
For a while, they are excited and feel the problem has been solved only to realise they are more or less paying more for the same service but with more employed people. The residents adjust and have more money go out of their pockets, whilst the chairman is satisfied he finally got what he wanted.
This might not sound familiar to you but this is what plays out in Nigeria fairly regularly even though the chairman might not be known to the majority of the populace.
Nigerians resisted subsidy removal but all of a sudden, pms that should have been tested before allowing it be imported into Nigeria, found its way in and got distributed and was only found out when it had done the damage!
Crazy! Just crazy!!!
Right now, there are long queues and all of a sudden the NNPC in carrying out its duty, tells us not to buy the high sulphur pms but keeps silent over how that fuel got into the country in the first place!
Who takes responsibility for the cars damaged as a result of this “bad” fuel?
Who pays damages for it?
Who in the NNPC or its affiliates that inspects and tests imported pms, is to be held accountable for this?
So, now through the back door, fuel is selling for NGN 400 at filling stations according to transport workers. This has to be a hand of God in causing a very speedy subsidy removal that affects everyone.
We all know that what happens in Lagos and Abuja spills to the rest of the country soon enough.
So with this social experiment, Nigerians have proven that they can still survive even when pump price is increased to NGN 302 or more.
Smart! Just smart!!
I think that the media, NLC, any other concerned body, needs to really do an expose on the state of our refineries and how it can come back to life.
Nigeria seriously deserve better!
Funny thing is, the refineries may come back to life and yet pump price will keep increasing arbitrarily.
This is Nigeria after all!
