
Mele Kyari needs no introduction to an average Nigerian. He heads the octopoidal superstructure called the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation Limited (NNPCL), the only other organisation that has chastised Nigerians with similar size of scorpions deployed earlier in the year by Godwin Emefiele’s Central Bank.
Following the recent increases in the price of petroleum products, which has seen a litre of petrol first jump above N500 and later above N600, not a few Nigerians have resorted to prayers that the promised local refining capacity via Dangote Refinery and the other advertised modular refineries would come on stream, soonest.
In attempting to justify the persistent increases in petroleum prices, officials have said that the Naira bashing by the different forces-including the willing buyer, willing seller policy, the forces of demand and supply and market forces have combined to push the prices of petroleum products on a free fall.
The hope of many is that once Nigeria regains her local refining capacity, all the forces that have been blowing dangerous waves across her shores would cease. Many are convinced that with local refining, we should have a stable currency and a reduction in the galloping price of petroleum products.
But Mele Kyari, the man who superintends over NNPCL thinks otherwise. He has no kind words for his countrymen. Forget the fact that his corporation should carry the burden of guilt for all the travails the oil sector has inflicted on the nation in recent years.
In our native Africa, the elders would say if you don’t have money in your pockets to solve a problem, you should have kind words. Mele Kyari, after supervising the injection of sorrow and pains in the veins of his countrymen, through incessant price adjustments and occasional fuel scarcity, still has the boldness to pour bitter vituperations, akin to the backstabbing arrow of a close pal. Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar, in his dying moments, made the bitter cry to signify such a letdown, when he shouted at Brutus, his friend, Etu Brute!
Kyari had said: “There is a notion that if the product is processed locally, prices will reduce. Let me make it clear that it is not going to change anything. If you produce locally, the refineries will also input the cost of production and other things and it will be sold at the current price.
“There will also be no subsidy when local production starts because there is no cash-to-back subsidy, this country no longer has the resources to continue with subsidy.”
He was simply telling his countrymen there is no hope for you in tomorrow; for the dangers you see today, are a tip of the iceberg! But his logic doesn’t look realistic. Refining locally eliminates several charges including freight, insurance, and even the dollar component in the product price.
In my native Yoruba culture, our people would say a kii gbo buburu lenu abore (the chief priest does not prophesy evil). Chief Priest Kyari sees doom, he has simply poured scorn and dashed our hopes.
Indeed, his latest declaration would easily justify the expectations by many Nigerians that one of President Bola Tinubu’s early-day love letters, the type that was delivered to Emefiele and Abdulrasheed Bawa of the EFCC, should have located his doorsteps. Even now, many still retain the hope that the mail carrier would locate his residence shortly.
Here is a man, who, as chief servant to the immediate past Petroleum Minister-President Muhammadu Buhari, determined how much crude oil was available for sale and equally determined how much of the proceeds should go for “cost recovery.” At a stage, his recoveries overshot the proceeds accruing from the sales and so, what should accrue to the Federation Account dried up. He still claimed the nation was owing his corporation trillions in subsidy funds.
There were reports that under his watch, the nation’s four refineries with a total installed capacity of 445,000 barrels per day gulped about $19 billion in the name of Turn-Around-Maintenance, even though Dangote’s brand new 650,000 barrels per day refinery cost $18bn. His refineries have no product to show. Again, the corporation under him doubled the nation’s daily fuel consumption rate compared to what we had under Diezani Allinson-Madueke, though there is no evidence of a population boom.
Thus, for the first time in contemporary history, the Federation Account and the Sovereign Wealth Fund drew blank in an era of global rise in crude oil prices.
When you hear someone like Kyari uttering such words as mentioned above, you would know that he has read too much of Milton Friedman’s doctrine which insists that the “business of business is business.” Simply put, businesses should have no social conscience and the whole idea of social responsibility is balderdash.
In his September 13, 1970 piece in the New York Times, which he titled: “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” Friedman argued that businesses are merely interested in profits and that to say that businesses have “social conscience” is to preach “unadulterated socialism.”
Friedman said: “When I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the “social responsibilities of business in a free‐enterprise system, I am reminded of the wonderful line about the Frenchman who discovered at, the age of 70 that he had been speaking prose all his life.”
According to him, businesses should have nothing to do with desirable social ends such as providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution, and such things that enhance societal good, adding that businessmen who talk to the contrary “are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.”
The irony of it all is that Kyari sits atop a public corporation, the one which has the responsibility to provide the lion’s share of ingredients the government needs to enhance public good.
The essence of government is basically not about profit and loss. Government is mandated by the constitution that guarantees its existence to ensure peace, order, and good governance in the society and in other words, ensure the happiness of the greatest number of its citizens.
So, Kyari should know that holding fast to the Friedman treatise runs contrary to the good of all. Rather than stay hoodwinked by the ‘Business of Business is Business (profits)’ mantra, Kyari and his co-drivers at the NNPCL and such other organisations, should adopt the reverse-the Business of Business should and must all be about the welfare of all.
