4th August, 2015
By Johnson Nwanuforo
The call on the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) by the President of the Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria (IPMAN), Elder Chinedu Okoronkwo, to immediately stop storing petroleum products meant for his members in the tank farms belonging to Capital Oil and Gas Industries Limited, is not surprising to discerning Nigerians abreast with the factors that engender fuel scarcity in Nigeria. What is, however, surprising is that given the role Mr. Ifeanyi Ubah played in the run up to the 2015 presidential election as the Chairman of the Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN), the Buhari Presidency will still allow his Capital Oil a day after May 29, 2015 to be messing up the supply of petroleum products in the polity. It beats the imagination of patriotic Nigerians why this situation will continue to prevail in the downstream sector of the economy.
Most people that are conversant with the intrigues and machinations that promote fuel scarcity in Nigeria believe that the major culprit is Ifeanyi Ubah’s Capital Oil. This has to do with the fact that Capital Oil stores about 60 per cent petrol (PMS) and almost 100 per cent of Kerosene (DPK) for the NNPC in its tank farms. As pointed out recently by Mr. Okoronkwo Orji, a spokesman of Capital Oil, his company has had to ban some marketers from lifting petroleum products from its terminals whenever they refuse to comply with the directive to deliver at designated locations and sell at government approved price. What this means is that the rate of supply of these products into the system is at the whims and caprices of Ifeanyi Ubah, the owner of Capital Oil.
With almost the power of life and death over the supply of petroleum products in the Nigerian system, it is not surprising that fuel scarcity manifests any time Ifeanyi Ubah is not happy with any policy of the government. Readers should remember how a few months ago, Ifeanyi Ubah boasted that he defied marketers of petroleum products by undermining the strike action they called as a means of getting the federal government to pay them the monies owned them for distributing petroleum products throughout the country. However, while Ifeanyi Ubah has continued to project this act as a patriotic favour done to Nigerians, the truth remains that he only released products owned by the NNPC that were stored in his tank farms as a strategy to warm himself into the good books of a Buhari Presidency that has vowed to probe all activities of the NNPC (importation of petroleum products, petroleum subsidy, unapproved kerosene subsidy, etc) which resolutions are bound to
net Capital Oil as a major culprit. All that it will take to realize that Ifeanyi Ubah only embarks on ventures with the potential to serve his own selfish economic interest is to reflect on the reasons behind his intervention in the leadership crisis that engulfed IPMAN in 2011.
According to Elder Okoronkwo: “Sometime in 2011, there was this peace process in IPMAN where everybody came together as one indivisible organization. Now Ubah was the proponent of this peace move … but we have now discovered why he decided to make that peace”. The result of the peace move, Elder Okoronkwo insists, is that “sixty percent of our allocation was signed off to be discharged to his tank farm…. NNPC will put our product in Ubah’s tank farm, he will sell it … and tell us there is no product”. This is the vintage Ifeanyi Ubah for you. He will go into a venture, reap almost all the benefits, and pretend to have extended invaluable favour to his victims. I am sure most Nigerians have not forgotten the altercation between Cosmas Maduka and Ifeanyi Ubah a few years ago over a bank loan procured by Maduka to enable Ubah to buy and sell petroleum products for the benefit of both men. The endeavour went awry when Maduka accused Ubah of
procuring and selling their petroleum products without extending his own proceeds to him, even as the banks were on his neck for the repayment of the loans. So much for an Ifeanyi Ubah who continues to project the fairy-tale that he disrupted the strike action embarked upon by petroleum marketers because of his love for President Muhammadu Buhari and the Nigerian people.
The issue at hand is not that petroleum products have continued to be scarce at the filling stations, and where they are even available, they are sold at rates above approved prices. The point is that Ifeanyi Ubah has continued to make it impossible for the root cause of the problem to be addressed, and that is, the crisis of leadership in IPMAN. According to Elder Okoronkwo, “we are now asking questions because the agreement of 60 percent ended with the regime of our former President, Aminu Abdulkadri. And for Ubah to still continue to cause this problem, he brought one Obasi Lawson to be the National President of IPMAN without an election”. In effect, Ifeanyi Ubah, without even being a marketer, has continued to meddle in the affairs of IPMAN to the extent that the non-resolution of its leadership crisis is one of the factors engendering fuel scarcity in the polity, and in the process leading to the suffering of the Nigerian people.
As the Director of the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), Mordecai Ladan, pointed out recently, government has continued to express “displeasure at the illegal activity and the ever-growing vehicular queues at the filling stations”. According to Ladan, “preliminary investigations revealed that the prevailing hike in retail prices of PMS and DPK (Kerosene) across the country followed the unscrupulous activities of some depot owners…. who sell to various retailers at prices higher than the official ex-depot price of N77.66K and N34.51K, respectively”. This development has led the DPR to moot the idea of immediate suspension of direct sales of PMS and DPK to affected depots. In the case of IPMAN, which claims to have traced the continued scarcity of petroleum products in some parts of the country to the failure of Capital Oil tank farm to supply its members, it insists that the solution to the problem is for the NNPC to stop storing the
products its members have already paid for in Ifeanyi Ubah’s oil depots.
In the final analysis, the Buhari Presidency must come to terms with the fact that it has to beam its searchlight on the activities of Capital Oil in the last six years, if the lingering problem of fuel scarcity is to end. It is really surprising that at a time the Buhari Presidency is laying much stock in its determination to probe the NNPC, and officials of the corporation are reportedly being investigated by operatives of the Department of State Security (DSS), Ifeanyi Ubah, the owner of Capital Oil is freely walking the streets and taking advantage of the fact that the NNPC stores most of its petroleum products in his tank farms, to cause avoidable havoc in the supply system of petroleum products in Nigeria. Given the reported unflattering role of Capital Oil in the probes carried out by both the Senate and the House of Representatives as they affect the subsidy regimes in petrol and kerosene, Ifeanyi Ubah should be having some chat with operatives
of the DSS rather than using the humongous resources at his disposal to be messing up the supply of petroleum products in Nigeria.
—Nwanuforo is a researcher with Corporate Concepts Ltd, Abuja. Tel: 081-67954203.