Dangote vs the Oil Cartels: When the Cheese Lastly Moved

By Abiodun Alade

Nigeria, it has usually been stated, is a land the place paradox has develop into a lifestyle. Here’s a nation that pumps hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil from its bowels every day but has spent a long time importing the gas that drives its battered Danfos, glossy SUVs, and ever-thirsty mills. It’s like watching a baker promote flour after which queue as much as purchase bread or like a fisherman begging for fish stew. For these middlemen who styled themselves as oil entrepreneurs, this absurdity was no tragedy. It was, in actual fact, the golden goose.

Shortage was their ally, inefficiency their enterprise companion, and authorities subsidy their ever-generous uncle. They constructed empires not by producing worth however by mastering the artwork of ready. Sure, ready for licences, ready for foreign exchange allocations, ready for the following loophole to look in Nigeria’s leaky oil barrel. Like Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not But Born, they flourished in decay, discovering consolation in a system the place dysfunction was not a bug however the enterprise mannequin itself.

Entrepreneurs strutted and fretted their hour upon the stage, enriching themselves whereas the viewers, the Nigerian public paid the ticket value in queues, inflated costs, and black-market chaos.

Funding in refining? Too dangerous. Diversification into renewables? Too futuristic. Why construct when you would recreation the system? So long as imports flowed and authorities cheques cleared, the script remained the identical.

For half a century, the downstream oil sector was a theatre of dysfunction. Its actors knew their traces effectively, the ritual of shortage, the dance of subsidy, the backroom alternate of foreign exchange.

Then got here Aliko Dangote, with a refinery the dimensions of a small metropolis, and quietly rearranged the furnishings. Or, to borrow from Spencer Johnson’s boardroom fable Who Moved My Cheese, he didn’t simply transfer the cheese, he carted it off in bulk, rebranded it, and arrange a grocery store.

The Dangote Petroleum Refinery is not only infrastructure. It’s audacity in metal and concrete. At 650,000 barrels per day, it’s designed not solely to finish Nigeria’s dependence on imported gas however to show the nation into an exporter.

Critics mutter about monopoly, and there’s satire in that too. For many years, a cartel of entrepreneurs fattened themselves on inefficiency, but out of the blue it’s the industrialist who builds one thing who’s accused of dominance.

However past the jokes lies one thing profound. This isn’t merely a refinery. It’s a shift in narrative, an indication that dysfunction is just not Nigeria’s destiny, {that a} imaginative and prescient sustained throughout scepticism can, in actual fact, bend actuality. As Chinua Achebe as soon as wrote, “When the moon is shining, the cripple turns into hungry for a stroll.” Nigeria, lengthy crippled by inefficiency, is starting to stir.

Again to Johnson’s maze. The entrepreneurs, like Hem, are nonetheless staring on the empty cheese station, muttering about how unfair life is. They hope the previous days of subsidy and foreign exchange windfalls will return. They worry the unknown greater than they worry irrelevance.

They now seem like Nokia executives in 2007, laughing on the iPhone whereas holding on to buttons nobody wished. NITEL, Nigeria’s once-mighty telecoms firm, fell the identical approach, clinging to yesterday whereas tomorrow walked previous its rusty gates. Billionaire businessman Femi Otedola, who led the formation of the Depot and Petroleum Merchandise Entrepreneurs Affiliation of Nigeria (DAPPMAN), has warned DAPPMAN and its co-travellers to adapt, innovate, or perish. The entrepreneurs certainly know that NITEL is now lowered to a ghost story dad and mom inform their youngsters about how a cellphone line used to take two years to put in.

However not like telephones, oil is survival. And the entrepreneurs, like Johnson’s Hem, sit on the deserted cheese station, ready for the dysfunction system that may by no means return. They situation threats of collapse, hoping worry should purchase them time. But historical past is unkind to those that mistake yesterday’s privileges for tomorrow’s ensures.

Those that adapt could but uncover new cheese in logistics, petrochemicals, renewable power, or technology-driven distribution. Those that refuse will fade, like outdated actors refusing to go away the stage lengthy after the curtain has fallen.

Now, even their previous allies within the industrial labyrinth – PENGASSAN (Petroleum and Pure Gasoline Senior Workers Affiliation of Nigeria) and NUPENG (Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Pure Gasoline Staff (NUPENG) reveal themselves as defenders of a dying patronage system, clutching at yesterday’s privileges as in the event that they have been immutable rights. These unions now rail in opposition to a refinery that symbolises the very industrial renewal Nigerians have lengthy desired. Their posturing is just not advocacy however self-preservation, thinly veiled makes an attempt to guard rents, intimidate reformers and drag the nation again right into a cycle of shortage and import dependency. It’s time their rhetoric is correctly unveiled as anxiousness masquerading as outrage, a reflex to sabotage change slightly than form it. A refusal to just accept that the maze has modified.

However the maze has modified. There isn’t any going again. Not like 2012, Nigerians are wiser and this time, President Bola Tinubu has not flinched. His blunt declaration on inauguration day “Subsidy is gone” was each coverage and epitaph.

Wole Soyinka as soon as warned, “The person dies in all who preserve silent within the face of tyranny.” On this context, the tyranny was inefficiency, and silence was complicity. Dangote’s refinery has damaged that silence with the roar of machines.

The Dangote Refinery is greater than a manufacturing unit. It’s a metaphor, a mirror, and maybe even an ethical. It exhibits that the partitions of Nigeria’s maze will not be unshakeable. That change, although usually resisted, is feasible. That those that cling to dysfunction danger being left behind, clutching at recollections of a cheese that may by no means return.

The query is straightforward, will Nigeria’s oil entrepreneurs and their enablers study to maneuver with the cheese, or will they, like Hem, keep behind, grumbling at midnight corridors of a maze that has already shifted?

For the primary time in an extended whereas, the selection is just not within the arms of presidency, subsidy boards, or foreign exchange sellers. It lies within the capacity of an trade to adapt, or to die.

And that, maybe, is the best irony of all; that within the land the place absurdity as soon as reigned supreme, the actual joke could now be on the middlemen.