From Aloysius Attah, Onitsha
Chief Victor Chukwunonyelum Umeh is the Senator representing Anambra Central in the National Assembly. He is the Chairman, Senate Committee on Diaspora and Non-Governmental Organizations as well as member of various other committees. In this interview monitored on Channels TV, he bares his mind on issues surrounding the Nigerian petroleum sector, fuel price hike and also on recent developments in Labour Party.
How are you Senators faring in the face of the biting fuel price. Maybe you are probably paying lesser because you are not in Abuja having been on recess. What are you and your colleagues doing in the face of the hike in price and the hardships Nigerians are facing?
I don’t think it is a matter of where you are presently. Anywhere you are in Nigeria, you are feeling the pangs of the crisis we have in the distribution of premium motor spirit and its allied products. I’ve been in Anambra State for some time now and it has been very excruciating. Today I bought petrol N1250 and it has been like that for some time now and in Abuja, I hear from my children that it is almost the same thing; so it has been a national problem.
There are those who will say reverse that policy. What are your thoughts on that policy and the way to go?
Well, the cost of living is biting very hard on every Nigerian whether you are of the middle class or even those who pride themselves as the upper class in Nigeria are feeling the pitch. I think our problems have been as a result of people who have failed to do what they ought to do over time. The situation we find ourselves today is not strange to a lot of people including myself. What we are suffering today is something that has been projected to happen but those who are in a position to take the appropriate actions to save this country, for selfish reasons, refused to do the right thing. There is no way anybody would have been expecting that we won’t run into this problem in the PMS and allied products crisis in Nigeria when our refineries have been shut for many years now. We don’t refine these products and have relied solely on importation. There is no way you can regulate or control the price of things you don’t produce. When last year Mr President removed the oil subsidy finally on 29th May, some of us were happy that the sector where some people have been sucking Nigerians dry, that such regime has ended but it came without any plan to cushion the effect it will have on the Nigerians because if you don’t produce and refine these products locally, you continue to run into the problems of high cost. When subsidy was removed last year, a little while, the PMS price jumped to N637; I granted interview then and said that this was just the beginning because you just see people celebrating what they didn’t know what they were getting into. So long as you don’t get our refineries working, there is no way we won’t get to where we are today. Today, it’s N1250 a litre and in some places, it has got as high as N1400 and we are not doing anything to change it. As far back as 2018 when I was at the 8th Senate, during the request for the approval of the promissory note to pay oil subsidy debt running into hundreds of billions of Naira, I did say and it is on record that if Nigeria does not begin from 2018 to start doing something about our refinery, either we start a new refinery or ensure that the existing refineries goes back to work, it will be a case of postponing the doomsday. There is no way these things will continue to work that way but because those who are managing the oil sector have abandoned their duties and are now making money out of the subsidy and they didn’t think about how Nigeria will start producing these products.
Are you one of those who think that there are some cabals manipulating the system such that it impacts directly and puts more hardship on the average Nigerians? Do you think we should be asking tough questions about those managing the petroleum sector in this country and what do we need to do about them?
It is clearly obvious that some people are feeding fat on the situation. I also said in 2018/ 2019 that corruption has prevented Nigeria from breaking away from this problem because all the people who are in the sector are feeding fat on the dollars they make through the importation of PMS into the country thereby making them do nothing to ensure that our refineries work because they are making easy money from the system while Nigeria was bleeding to death. That is why, at this time we are now, those who have run our oil industry in the past six years or thereabout, from the time Mela Kyari came in, they are still there and nothing has changed, nothing has been working for the Nigerian people.
But there are some people who are blaming you and your colleague Senators for the Nigerian situation. You are representing the Nigerian people, if all these ills are going on, how would you just allow it to happen. You play oversight functions and allow these to go on unchecked?
We don’t allow those things to go unchecked. I am a member of the upstream petroleum resources committee in the Senate and I know that we have been interfacing with the agency, NUPRC; in fact, the current executive chairman, we screened him and I know I asked him salient questions like how are we going to resolve all these issues in the exploration sector, production and they gave us assurances that from the low production we are having of the crude, they have the capacity and expertise to shore up our production to 2.4 million barrels a day; at that time, we were around 1.25 million barrels a day. But here we are today, nothing has changed, we have not improved on our production while those managing the NNPCL as it were are busy importing PMS neglecting production. If you talk about oversight, there are two sides to it-oversight and executive functions. Somebody places people on their duties and we have been wondering why there has never been any surgical operation in the oil sector. As senators, we cannot order their removal.
But as an arm of government, immediately subsidy was removed in May last year, it affected every aspect of production, the economy, commodity prices etc. there are those who are afraid now that if the prices go up again, prices of commodity will be affected and economy will be impacted negatively. The question is, in a normal clime, you and your colleagues would have rushed back to plenary and attend to this kind of situation where Nigerians’ lives are directly impacted as representatives of the people.
We have set up an ad-hoc committee to investigate why our refineries are not working. The ad-hoc committee went to Portharcourt, Warri and Kaduna refineries and came back with a report that very soon these refineries will come back on stream and start working. As we are doing this, we are asking the questions and putting pressure that these things should be addressed. It takes executive action to put who is there to order. National Assembly has no power to sack people who are appointed by Mr President but we can mount pressure on that.
The feeling in the land is that the National Assembly should have suspended the holidays and come back to plenary and address the suffering of Nigerians. Go back on emergency and put pressure on Mr President to do something to alleviate the sufferings of Nigerians?
It is good to pass the blame on the National Assembly. We did reconvene on the 31st of July on emergency to address some of these issues and we are resuming on vacation on 17th September, so there is nothing we cannot do when we come back and we have been waiting on the Executive to do its own bit. The National Assembly will naturally in exercising its oversight powers raise issues of concern on those operating these sectors but the executive has to do something. I was listening to the Minister of State for Petroleum, Heineken Lokpobiri the other day and he was saying that the Petroleum Industry Act forbids the control of prices of petroleum products because they are deregulated. But the question is, is there anywhere in the PIA Act where the executive is precluded from revamping the refineries? There is no such thing. So it is the government that will bring our refineries back to stream and refine products locally to bring the prices down. So, it is an issue of policy and those who are in a position to take action are making gains out of it, howbeit unpatriotically, while Nigerians are suffering. I know it that when we resume, we will be in a position to put our voices again on the current issue. The Executive is not on vacation and when these things happen, they have the unlimited powers to deal with these current issues. Like I said, it is only a blind man that will not see that our petroleum industry, the managers and operators need a surgical overhaul of the sector. We need to change what is happening there. If those who have been there for over five years are not able to solve this problem for Nigerians, I don’t know what they are still doing there.
Questions about Labour Party. There are those who are asking about the Nenadi Usman Committee and how legitimate that is?
Those asking those questions don’t know that when you don’t have a legitimate executive committee in charge of your party, the issue of whether the constitution is followed or not will become unnecessary because we don’t have a legitimate executive committee now. Those who are claiming that they have the power to do so have not told Nigerians that their tenure in office has since expired and because they didn’t do what they were supposed to do to bring a succeeding leadership in the party, the party is now rudderless and that is what we have taken care of. When you don’t have a leadership in place, members of the party can come together to make decisions to create leadership for the party and that is what the Umuahia meeting was all about. You know I was the National Chairman of APGA for 10 years so I understand the workings of parties. There is no way you can have an elective convention that will create the leadership of the party without having congresses from ward level to local government to states before you arrive at the convention. What the people who are claiming they are the leaders of the party did was that they put the cart before the horse and time ran out on them. They didn’t do what they were supposed to do by the constitution of the party. You cannot do a convention to elect national officers of the party and then go back to conduct the ward, local government and state congress elections. This is a pyramid structure of business, you start from the ward level. Incidentally, there was a consent judgment that mandated and ordered these people to conduct a congress from ward level to the national convention in one year and they didn’t do that. That is a magical flight to the top.