I’m thinking here that I need to employ another language to properly express my exasperation at some of the issues that plague us, in this case, Petrol.
This is why I’m resorting to speaking Latin as against the English language.
Where is the President?
Ubi Est Praeses?
We need to know because he alone it appears, has the power to solve problems associated with our suffering.
Mr. President, only a couple of weeks ago, you instructed the NNPC to start to sell Crude Oil to Dangote Refinery in Naira.
Great initiative.
Dangote confirms that he has received a great amount of Crude already.
Dangote says he’s ready to supply fuel to the entire country.
What we don’t know is what NNPC is saying.
I grew up in a beautiful Nigeria.
Our hospitals worked for me when my head split in a domestic accident in 1967.
Our hospitals worked for me through the 70s when I thought malaria was going to take me out.
Our universities worked for me as a teenager.
Like Amerigo Bonasera, the character in the novel: The Godfather, who believed in America, sir, my generation still believes in Nigeria.
Even when Professor Chinua Achebe wrote: “There Was a Country,” and I read the book, I refused to accept his conclusions.
Mr President, many of us stand with Nigeria.
Many of us still hope.
Many of us still dream.
You hold the power to solve many of our problems, Mr. President.
Use it.
If you want free market, well, tell us without equivocation that you want free market.
If so, you must put a stop to all conversations between NNPC and Dangote Refinery. Just as there’s no one telling Dangote how much to sell Cement for, let him be free to sell his petrol at a price he determines.
Then, sir, you can impose a Petrol Tax.
If it is true that we actually consume 64 million litres of petrol daily, then, with a petrol tax of N100 per litre, you will put N6.4B in the nation’s treasury daily.
If this Arithmetic is correct, then, you may well be on your way to becoming the greatest president ever.
Petrol will no longer be a drain pipe on the nation. Instead, it will become a profit center.
You will become overnight, the infrastructure President of Nigeria because the treasury will be overflowing with money like the nation has never known before.
With Dangote getting his Crude in Naira and selling in Naira, and without the NNPC as middleman, petrol will still be as cheap or eventually cheaper than N600 per litre when more competitors come on stream.
This is not the time to play.
This is the time to think and to do.
Mr. President, please do not allow the NNPC to be the single offtaker of Dangote petrol.
If you do, your government will never settle down to govern.
It will not take long before NNPC introduces new bottlenecks to create new invincible subsidies for the nation’s treasury.
Dear Mr. President, step in, step up and solve our problems so that our problems do not solve us.
Michael Ovienmhada.
.
.
