Bizarre Politics of Oil and Gas

The corruption in the oil and gas sector, sadly, is accentuated by ethnic politics. Goke Omisore writes

I find some things very strange to understand in this country but equally very interesting and amusing – on a serious note. Our culture of arrogance grew steeply in the oil boom days to this oil doom day’s wealth. Now that it is vanishing under our nose the filtered arrogance of very few negligible men amongst of us is palpable. I am sure you must have run into one or two, may be a few, with a degree of haughtiness, who were flexing financial muscles. I am in the oil and gas industry. That says it all before the bubble collapsed, after thorough exhaustion.

However, it is undeniably fair that few men in this industry of oil and gas took deregulation and local contents to enviable heights of patriotism to them all. I doff my hat. They are the proud hope of greater tomorrow of Nigeria. But the rogues amongst of them must be demystified for who they truly are and their mission that has emptied our treasury must not go unpunished.
If you had enjoyed or profited from their day light robbery or better stated, criminal loots of our nation’s resources, I call that collateral or accidental windfall. It went around fairly well before the bubble burst. They wrecked our economy recklessly. Usually dressed to the nines, clean like a whistle, clean head shaved and diligently manicured gentlemen but often arrogant with audacious swaggers; they were cloaked in stolen doctored fuel subsidy.

The briefcase merchants of oil and gas – they held the nation spellbound in every sphere of our lives for years Where art thou vanished crooks? USDollar @ 400+ to one – left battered Naira waning in value while our economy is anorexic. Some people should be recalled for judgment day, I reasoned.

The local content law enacted with the best of intentions is to strengthen our collective interest of economic empowerment. Now, see how it has been thoroughly rubbished beyond the dreams and hope of a nation’s right of participation in growing and the sustainability of her own wealth and resources – our commonwealth frittered away by few men, with impunity. Give Nigerians an inch; they are capable of stretching it into a mile long on a negative note. They will bastardise it; unsalvageable by the Pope while we are prayerfully waiting for Jesus and hardly recognised by the wisdom that informed the enactment in the first place.

Get the best lawyers to decree or draft any law, ingenious Nigerians will riddle it with loopholes. What a species of homoserpient are we? And when it comes to such bazaar, it is often a well-orchestrated all Nigerians bazaar affairs. The Hausa man often led in his towering, Onilegogoro cap of admission into the corridor of power, breaking grounds with his preferred cousins often in AGIP (Any Government In Power”). Let us break up to make up a true fiscal federated union, where honesty reigns censored and legality affirmed. And please, let us stop this game of deceit and disillusionment.

The unwholesome activities most often powered by WAZOBIA: Hausa man; his Igbo buccaneers, accompanied with his crooked Yoruba geniuses but often not the best educated only but in fact, truants and vagabonds thrive in such daring adventures. Then “We are all Nigerians; our great Nation; Keep Nigeria One.” They are wont to say, gleefully.

Give me a break. They are all usually in collaborations and well-coordinated criminal game of: The more you look, the less you see. They move in and thoroughly devour and relish such kills with the ferocity of a well-coordinated Herds of Tigers feasting on their prey. Nigerians, take a deem view of the estates, this flawed amalgamation has a free for looting treasures. It has always been a crooked country from foundations.

Before you know it, carcasses of their spoils will be littering our nation’s memories and our economy limping in retrogressions and regrets; porous and spongy, captured by a few, treating all of us with sadistic disdain in their wanton unrestrained greed. No, 419 is too petty a crime to situate their status nor their souls. Please, don’t insult their trade. Preferably, treasonable ruins of a nation hopelessly in economic bondage, is more like it.

Not greasy kids’ stuff of petty thefts. They hate earning money; they revel in making monies in all currencies – preferred customers of all Banks. Then often belated, government will be running a feverish fire brigade emergency approach to reproach – long gone folks! Often, when the deeds have been markedly done, I beg, call in the US marines but I guess J.J Rawlings will be cheaper in cedes. Who is fooling who? They have the nation’s institutions thoroughly wired up in collusions, but averse in guilt; bed-ridden in debt and economic paralysis.

The oil and gas guys that raped this nation blind, you can smell them at a good distance away by the aroma of their designer perfumes. They reek of elegance and panache and you could scrape stolen wealth off their dubious foreheads as they ride down or walk down majestically in our so called classy social gatherings in our halls of shame, gloating, floating and glittering on our crater potholed roads (I am sure they expect apologies for damaging their wonders on wheels on such less dignified roads!) what it can do to their state of the arts glittering wheels – gloating unashamedly; unabashedly.

guilt-ridden? No, perished the thought. You must be very jealous and envious to think so. In their weird minds, they are very hard-working, they claimed and their Man of God is in attestation and consonance. Damn, you mere mortals. Who are you to think otherwise when such men are often slated for Canonisation in knighthood?

They drive, sorry, they are often cruising around, particularly going nowhere, savouring the air of arrivals in utter lawlessness, anchored on stolen wealth. In local palance, that is best described or appraised as a success story to the admiration of the teaming maddening crowd – ignorant, docile, indifferent or helpless masses, whose tax payers’ kerosene subsidies of the poor serves adequately well to satiate and empower their gluttony and other variants of avarice mutating in highly contagious virus on our youths’ minds that are highly susceptible.

They manipulate the industry shamelessly through all sorts of banker’s instruments and magic papers, not sparing their lawyers expertise. They are Messiahs, doling out often generously for the wrong reasons on Ego-tripping, uncharitable, unprintable charities in pittance from their deep vaults of stolen monies. Our nation’s cultures and values stand forever, I repeat, forever altered!

In Nigeria’s oil and gas industries or slaughterhouses, fingers are not equal, neither are the hangers, though an all-comers game. From the most educated to the itinerant illiterates, please bow for the oil and gas barons and the grand master bunkerers – the gurus. Don’t underrate the wiz kids; the lords of the creeks and crevices of the oil rich Delta sanctuaries of the black gold – the Tompolos and Dukubos armed with moral piety of ownership.

Their claims to me seem legitimate in the face of wholesale sponsored state frauds, a large local governments’ sharing of our commonwealth. Who is going to bell the fat cat? From their well-suited chauffeur-driven wheels to private hangers of few jets and the state of the arts Chateaur –French word for mansion or castle – eloquently distinguishes men from the little boys in oil and gas, often spoiling their friends and nuclear family in digital glittering yachts – customised – in this land of pure water sachets-drinking nation, a privileged luxury drink of some professors.

Our shameful institutions from our apex bank, CBN to all shades of other banks; NNPC and her subsidiaries of subterfuges and foreign oil companies and foreigners all took us to the cleaners in a no-holds-barred scavenging of a nation. They bent our backs and now forced us on our knees. Today, we are gasping for economic breath – anorexic and toxic. I think all culprits should be brought to book and they should lose all their ill-gotten wealth.

I dare President Muhammadu Buhari to do justice. We are in full support. Anything short of citizens’ revolution in this instance, is unpatriotic and a subjugation of the rest of us. In Saudi Arabia, I guess a stolen barrel of oil will earn you decapitation. In Nigeria, applause is considered more befitting of your new arrival status. If you are caught with ship loads of empty vessel, a national honour to boost is often your reward. You are our economic Saints – certified home grown snubs in this banana republic.

If the superfluous world and the magic words of oil and gas, sounds confounding to you like magic, you are not alone but let me ease your fatigue of such high class “Science fiction” industry, powered by the ingenious of a few in just three words of petroleum products: PMS, diesel and kerosene. That’s what the fraud is all about, folks. How come the whole nation gets fooled by a few amongst of us for so damn too long and ruinous, yet, we all did nothing, nothing and nothing. I humbly submit.
-Omisore wrote from Lagos

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I dare President Muhammadu Buhari to do justice. We are in full support. Anything short of citizens’ revolution in this instance, is unpatriotic and a subjugation of the rest of us. In Saudi Arabia, I guess a stolen barrel of oil will earn you decapitation. In Nigeria, applause is considered more befitting of your new arrival status. If you are caught with ship loads of empty vessel, a national honour to boost is often your reward