Ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo, a veteran of war, and proponent of ‘do or die politics’ that sees politics as war by other means, is set for war against NNPCL. Obasanjo, a formidable opponent with intimidating credentials is an adversary who says “nothing embarrasses him”, a warrior who routinely cuts deals with enemies of his enemies, or “an incredible opportunist” to borrow retired Brigadier General Alabi Isama’s phrase in his “Tragedy of Victory’. NNPCL must also be warned that Obasanjo is a fighter who in the words of his friend, Andrew Young, former US permanent representatives at the United Nations (UN), “pursues his goals with great tenacity without caring about who he made mad”.

But this is not to discourage NNPCL; I will in fact encourage NNPCL to accept Chief Obasanjo’s challenge. After all, it is not as if NNPCL, regarded by many as ‘a cesspool of corruption, an organization deficit in character and honour and the scourge of Nigerian fuel consumers has much to lose in a battle over honour. It was only  two days ago that the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) was asking through its letter dated January 4 that the Group Chief Executive Officer of the body, Mele Kyari, to explain the disappearance of over N825 billion and $2.5 billion allegedly deducted from crude oil sales between 2020 and 2021 ostensibly for refinery repairs.

All Obasanjo – who cannot stand being proved to be imperfect – wants is for NNPCL to stake its honour by confirming that Port Harcourt and Warri refineries are indeed working. And now with  a television station mischievously waking up trouble that was hitherto deep asleep, the die is cast. It is one more opportunity for a vindictive Obasanjo to prove he alone is infallible, the fact he tried hard to establish in his war memoir “My Command” and in his “Olusegun Obasanjo, The Presidential Legacy 1999-2007”.

His current battle is anchored on the following syllogism: He had as president invited Shell International to buy equity or run our refineries for us on its own terms, offers Shell turned down. Aliko Dangote, the apple of his eyes, was able to put a team together and offered government $750m to run the refineries on Public/Private Partnership basis (PPP) His successor, the late Umaru Yar’Adua refunded Dangote’s money following undertaking by NNPCL to manage the refineries. NNPCL ended up frittering away billons of naira without giving relief to Nigerians since he, Obasanjo left office. Therefore, NNPCL’s claim that both Port Harcourt and Warri refineries are now working cannot be true.

Obasanjo might have not provided enough empirical facts to validate its thesis beyond NNPCL’s past records which seem to provide additional ammunition to consolidate what Obasanjo considers as an unassailable position.

But that was until Femi Falana, the respected human rights lawyer, who besides Obasanjo who wears his “PDP’s award of ‘Father of Nigeria’ title like St Christopher’s cross, is in my opinion, one Nigerian, that is deserving of being called “Mr. Nigeria”, stepped in to provide the missing link.

According to him, the cancellation of the federal  government’ Public, Private Partnership (PPP) arrangement for the management of the Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna refineries approved by the Obasanjo government in 2007 was attributed to the questionable circumstances surrounding the deal. First, it was alleged that Obasanjo “in utter breach” of the Privatisation and Commercialisation Act, side-lined Vice President Atiku Abubakar, the chairman of the National Council on Privatisation (NCP), and “took over the privatisation of a number of public enterprises.”

These include Obasanajo’s sale on May 17, 2007 of a 51% stake in the Port Harcourt refinery to Bluestar Oil for US$561 million and on May 28, 2007, sales of 51% shares in Kaduna Refinery at a cost of $160m to the same Bluestar, a consortium of three domestic companies, including Dangote Oil, Zenon Oil and Transcorp in which Obasanjo had acquired large shares through ‘blind trust.’

Scandalously, the deals were consummated in the last days of the Obasanjo administration despite the four-day protests by National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) and the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN) which also alleged that the nation had been short-changed as the shares acquired in the Port Harcourt refinery for $516 million were worth US$5 billion.

Obasanjo’s case is not helped by the National Assembly awful report on the privatization programme he supervised. The World Bank for instance had defined privatization as a programme for middle-income countries ‘with a competitive market, a market-friendly environment with a good capacity to regulate. But as victims of cultural imperialism that ape everything, including policy thrust that have no chance of survival in our own environment, our leaders sheepishly followed Britain and France’s privatisation of the eighties.

First to be launched was the Babangida’s Privatisation and Commercialisation Act of 1988, the Bureau of Public Enterprises Act of 1993 and Obasanjo’s Privatisation and Commercialisation Act of 1999. They were all doomed to fail.

We don’t need any other proof than the 7th Senate report of November 30, 2011 which directed that the National Council on Privatization rescind the sale of Abuja International Hotels Limited (Nicon Luxury Hotel) for failure of the core investor to deliver on  some of the fundamental provision of the Share Purchase Agreement/Post Acquisition Plan; that the sales of assets of Daily Times Nigeria Pic by Folio Communications Limited and its directors should be investigated by anti-graft agencies and the sold assets recovered; that the former Directors-General, Nasir El-Rufai, Julius Bala and Irene Nkechi Chigbue be reprimanded for seeking approval directly from the president instead of the NCP as stipulated in the Public Enterprises Act 1999; and that   the Director-General, BPE, Ms Bolanle Onagoruwa be relieved of her appointment for gross incompetence in the management of the Bureau of Public Enterprises and for illegal and fraudulent sale of the 5 % FGN residual shares in Eleme Petrochemicals Company Limited (EPCL).

Privatisation of the power sector by President Jonathan, his godson was also a rip-off. In August 2013, 15 companies made up of 10 Distribution Companies (DISCOs) and five Generation Companies (GENCOs) paid $2.238b to take over 60% of unbundled PHCN after an injection of between $8-$15b of tax payer’s money.

Commenting on this on the occasion of the 11th Bola Tinubu Colloquium that took place in Abuja, Tinubu had then observed that “The PDP administration shared our generation, distribution and transmission to their friends and cronies without very deep and thoughtful research and evaluation. It has now become pork chops. It was his view that “for a more constructive reform to improve generation, transmission and distribution, “the privatisation must be reviewed”.

Unlike our one-eyed kings who had no faith in themselves, it is on record that Obafemi Awolowo and his colleagues who laid the foundation for the Western Region, today regarded as the most educated part of Africa; Ahmadu Bello, who put together the biggest business conglomerate in Africa, south of Sahara and Michael Okpara and his group credited with running the fastest growing economy in the world in the early sixties, did not quarrel with  the economic model foisted on them by the colonial masters. All they did was to adapt mixed-economy model/public enterprises to the peculiarities of their own environment and the special needs of their people.

It was also unfortunately lost on our one-eyed kings that we have no capitalists in Nigeria but parasitic elites who have no stakes beyond taking whatever they can get from the state. We see this play out daily with importers of labour of other societies including substandard goods and drugs while thousands of our highly qualified youths scrambled abroad in search of greener pastures. We also see this among unpatriotic sponsors of violent armed immigrant herdsmen who illegally occupy our ungoverned forests in the north from where they visit periodic violence on subsistence farmers, killing, maiming and sending survivors to IDP camps while houses, farm lands and villages are forcefully taken over.

Whereas Western societies are owned by powerful individual capitalists who in early eighties under Margaret Thatcher decided that public enterprises had fulfilled its historical mission of repositioning the impoverished poor of the post World1 and 11 period as average workers  Their historic mission was to guarantee system survival without posing a threat to the highly stratified class social system by being able to build a house without mortgage or sending your children to the university without loan.

And for Obasanjo and his crusading colleagues who falsely claim ‘for our today they sacrificed their tomorrow’, we now know patriotism sometimes is not without altruism. It was Babangida, who annulled the most credible election in our nation’s history, in order to remain in power or swap position with Abacha, who put and sustained him in power through military coups. Obasanjo’s boys also spoke of alleged bribe with tons of naira stocked in ‘Ghana must go’ bags in pursuit of derailed third term agenda, Obasanjo has continued to deny.