alexzanda's o.p.i.

I WANT TO RUN AN OIL REFINERY!




JTF officer giving news briefing at Port Harcourt in May 2012

Did you see the late night news on Silverbird Television Lagos yesterday?  The one about the Joint Task Force (JTF) in the Niger Delta tackling oil thieves?  The report was that the JTF had destroyed 10 illegal refineries in the Niger Delta in their raid!

I decided to go online for more facts and there in my face were more stories about more raids by the JTF on illegal refineries as far back as January 2012. (Channels TV website story of Mon Jan 23, 2012 and Vanguard website story of June 8, 2012)

I SIMPLY DON'T GET IT!

MATTERS ARISING:

1. If we can have thousands of illegal functional refineries within one region of the country, operated by street boys, how is it that Nigeria, the Giant of Africa cannot run 3, just 3?!

These boys run these refineries under duress, with materials as common as aluminum drums and still have them highly functional.

When Prof. Pat Utomi mentioned during the fuel subsidy removal strike that crude oil refining is not rocket science, I never understood. Now I really know!

Thus, I recommend that those people arrested for the operation of these illegal refineries should be given special treatment and given our problem of refinery mismanagement to handle and let us see if we will not have results within a couple of months. This I recommend considering the fact that with all the money that has been sunk into the refineries maintenance, our government is still telling us that it would take another two years from now to see our refineries working. News, for those that believe!

2. Why are we still exporting crude oil only for the refined products to return to Nigerians very expensive when we can invest in these illegal refineries and make refined oil products cheap?

RECOMMENDATION:

Madam Finance Minister and her boss should know that it would be more profitable to engage these enterprising youths through their local refining technologies than the government's proposal of engaging youths and paying them N10,000! N10,000 for what? Does that qualify as minimum wage?  The youths don't need favours. They need to be given a future. Help them legally run their refineries! Don't you know how many of our countries problems would be solved? Oh, I forget. The Cabal would be out of business.

3. The oil blocks are owned by the moneybags, the oil companies own our oil and our government does not want to give us fuel subsidy.

RECOMMENDATION:

Why not let us own just a little piece of this action? 

I WANT TO RUN AN OIL REFINERY!



After all, we once had a President who also doubled as Minister for Petroleum.  No one had the guts to audit his books and hell did not break loose.