By Abiodun Alade
Nigeria, it has typically been stated, is a land the place paradox has develop into a lifestyle. Here is a nation that pumps hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil from its bowels every day but has spent a long time importing the gas that drives its battered Danfos, smooth SUVs, and ever-thirsty turbines. It is like watching a baker promote flour after which queue as much as purchase bread or like a fisherman begging for fish stew. For these middlemen who styled themselves as oil entrepreneurs, this absurdity was no tragedy. It was, the truth is, the golden goose.
Scarcity was their ally, inefficiency their enterprise accomplice, and authorities subsidy their ever-generous uncle. They constructed empires not by producing worth however by mastering the artwork of ready. Yes, ready for licences, ready for foreign exchange allocations, ready for the following loophole to look in Nigeria’s leaky oil barrel. Like Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, they flourished in decay, discovering consolation in a system the place dysfunction was not a bug however the enterprise mannequin itself.
Marketers strutted and fretted their hour upon the stage, enriching themselves whereas the viewers, the Nigerian public paid the ticket value in queues, inflated costs, and black-market chaos.
Investment in refining? Too dangerous. Diversification into renewables? Too futuristic. Why construct when you might sport the system? As lengthy as imports flowed and authorities cheques cleared, the script remained the identical.
For half a century, the downstream oil sector was a theatre of dysfunction. Its actors knew their traces effectively, the ritual of shortage, the dance of subsidy, the backroom change of foreign exchange.
Then got here Aliko Dangote, with a refinery the scale of a small metropolis, and quietly rearranged the furnishings. Or, to borrow from Spencer Johnson’s boardroom fable Who Moved My Cheese, he didn’t simply transfer the cheese, he carted it off in bulk, rebranded it, and arrange a grocery store.
The Dangote Petroleum Refinery isn’t just infrastructure. It is audacity in metal and concrete. At 650,000 barrels per day, it’s designed not solely to finish Nigeria’s dependence on imported gas however to show the nation into an exporter.
Critics mutter about monopoly, and there’s satire in that too. For a long time, a cartel of entrepreneurs fattened themselves on inefficiency, but abruptly it’s the industrialist who builds one thing who’s accused of dominance.
But past the jokes lies one thing profound. This isn’t merely a refinery. It is a shift in narrative, an illustration that dysfunction isn’t Nigeria’s destiny, {that a} imaginative and prescient sustained throughout scepticism can, the truth is, bend actuality. As Chinua Achebe as soon as wrote, “When the moon is shining, the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.” Nigeria, lengthy crippled by inefficiency, is starting to stir.
Back to Johnson’s maze. The entrepreneurs, like Hem, are nonetheless staring on the empty cheese station, muttering about how unfair life is. They hope the previous days of subsidy and foreign exchange windfalls will return. They concern the unknown greater than they concern irrelevance.
They now seem like Nokia executives in 2007, laughing on the iPhone whereas holding on to buttons nobody needed. NITEL, Nigeria’s once-mighty telecoms firm, fell the identical method, clinging to yesterday whereas tomorrow walked previous its rusty gates. Billionaire businessman Femi Otedola, who led the formation of the Depot and Petroleum Products Marketers Association of Nigeria (DAPPMAN), has warned DAPPMAN and its co-travellers to adapt, innovate, or perish. The entrepreneurs absolutely know that NITEL is now decreased to a ghost story dad and mom inform their kids about how a telephone line used to take two years to put in.
But in contrast to telephones, oil is survival. And the entrepreneurs, like Johnson’s Hem, sit on the deserted cheese station, ready for the dysfunction system that can by no means return. They problem threats of collapse, hoping concern should buy them time. Yet historical past is unkind to those that mistake yesterday’s privileges for tomorrow’s ensures.
Those who adapt might but uncover new cheese in logistics, petrochemicals, renewable power, or technology-driven distribution. Those who refuse will fade, like outdated actors refusing to depart the stage lengthy after the curtain has fallen.
Now, even their previous allies within the industrial labyrinth – PENGASSAN (Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria) and NUPENG (Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) reveal themselves as defenders of a dying patronage system, clutching at yesterday’s privileges as in the event that they had been immutable rights. These unions now rail towards a refinery that symbolises the very industrial renewal Nigerians have lengthy desired. Their posturing isn’t advocacy however self-preservation, thinly veiled makes an attempt to guard rents, intimidate reformers and drag the nation again right into a cycle of shortage and import dependency. It is time their rhetoric is correctly unveiled as nervousness masquerading as outrage, a reflex to sabotage change relatively than form it. A refusal to just accept that the maze has modified.
But the maze has modified. There isn’t any going again. Unlike 2012, Nigerians are wiser and this time, President Bola Tinubu has not flinched. His blunt declaration on inauguration day “Subsidy is gone” was each coverage and epitaph.
Wole Soyinka as soon as warned, “The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.” In this context, the tyranny was inefficiency, and silence was complicity. Dangote’s refinery has damaged that silence with the roar of machines.
The Dangote Refinery is greater than a manufacturing facility. It is a metaphor, a mirror, and even perhaps an ethical. It exhibits that the partitions of Nigeria’s maze should not unshakeable. That change, although typically resisted, is feasible. That those that cling to dysfunction threat being left behind, clutching at recollections of a cheese that can by no means return.
The query is straightforward, will Nigeria’s oil entrepreneurs and their enablers be taught to maneuver with the cheese, or will they, like Hem, keep behind, grumbling at nighttime corridors of a maze that has already shifted?
For the primary time in an extended whereas, the selection isn’t within the arms of presidency, subsidy boards, or foreign exchange sellers. It lies within the potential of an trade to adapt, or to die.
And that, maybe, is the best irony of all; that within the land the place absurdity as soon as reigned supreme, the actual joke might now be on the middlemen.
