Honestly, sometimes, I just can’t help but feel that up there in the upper echelons of leadership, there are people whose sole purpose in office is simply to frustrate the life of the common man. As in there are some decisions that they’re making that it’s clear as day that it won’t be beneficial to anyone, yet they’re doing happily, regardless of how it would affect us.
Take for instance, the Dangote refineries; despite all the fiasco that came with its launching and how he complained that the government didn’t seem to be on his side. Well, he had finally commenced operation and other petroleum products like aviation fuel and kerosene were already being produced and sold. However, it was only recently that they started producing PMS, but for some reason, local dealers still prefer to import.
I don’t know why exactly, it could be that the rate he’s giving them is not what they’re used to. Maybe he’s selling it at a price too high, or he’s giving it lower than they’re comfortable with. Either way, no progress has been made so far with regard to PMS and even cooking gas. About a few weeks ago, the price of petrol in Lagos and other southwestern states was already over N1200 for a liter. However, here in Owerri and other south-eastern states, we were still buying at N850 to a liter.
Now though, we’re buying it at close to N1100, I can’t even begin to imagine what the cost would be in Lagos. None of the decisions these guys have made have been helpful, they’re only making things worse with each policy that they put out and we’re all just out here, suffering and watching TikTok! It’s frustrating!
All these are not isolated to the oil and gas sector though, even the power sector is no different. Besides the companies having defective transformers and giving us an epileptic power supply, there is also the main issue of vandalism! People would just go and steal major parts of the transformer, they’d steal armored cables and cart them all away to be sold. It’s insane how often this happens, plunging the areas into darkness. I think I made a post about how such a thing happened to us and we were in darkness for quite a while!
Anyway, the minister of interior decided that the one solution to this dilemma was to open up a new law enforcement agency, different from the police and others, whose sole job would be to safeguard transformers and the like. And the force will be called Power Rangers.
I wish I was making this up, honestly, I do. But I’m definitely not, we need Power Rangers to protect our transformers and armored cables. This is the kind of thing we’re dealing with in Nigeria. Instead of them to equip existing agencies and expanding on their duties. Increase their pay and also approve the hiring of more people, no. They would rather create a whole new agency that will cost a ridiculous amount of money, money that the new agents will not even enjoy simply because they will still be paid peanuts.
Of course, and as per normal law enforcement style, the power will get into their heads and they’ll find a way to use their position to extort money from people. It’s just a crazy situation, one that we can never really wrap our heads around. But what can we do? This seems to be our new reality and from the look of things, it might still get a whole lot worse because these guys are not here to play. They’ll keep on sucking out and draining us. And there will be no stopping them because when they’ll leave, they’ll simply put in people who will keep the money flowing for them.
This is not a happy post, but despite everything, there are still a couple of things to be happy about. For now, let’s just use that to hold ourselves. Hopefully, things will get better.
