The building of refineries in Nigeria may not be realistic until government engenders an enabling environment that encourages investment by local marketers, the managing director of Capital Oil, Ifeanyi Ubah has said.
Speaking on the prevailing fuel scarcity in the country, Ubah argued that removal of fuel subsidy remains the only viable option for President Muhammadu Buhari to get the country out of perennial petrol scarcity.
He further advised the Federal Government to assist investors interested in building refineries in the country, noting that failure by government to give the right support to players in the oil and gas sector in spite of their capacity to run the industry successfully had subjected Nigerians go through harrowing experience for too long.
His words: “I urge president Buhari to take a bold step and deregulate the oil sector. He is not a stranger to the sector having being a former minister of petroleum. He will be respected for taking the step, there’s no point paying subsidy when Nigerians are nor benefiting it. The president will be doing the right thing if he deregulated the sector so that that products will be sold at cheaper prices in the future.”
Ubah urged Nigerians to support President Buhari if he decides to to implement deregulation in other to get petroleum products at the lowest price.
He said: “I have always been of the view that we should deregulate so that we can cut out corruption but unfortunately Nigerians didn’t take it from Jonathan.”
The Capital Oil boss faulted the methodology adopted by marketers to demand government owed them saying, “indeed the marketers are being owed large sums of money and I am one of those being owed a large sum of money but I believe that dialogue should have been the choice of the marketers especially considering the state of the nation.nIt was unprecedented in the country for oil marketers to go on strike for up to four days and what I expected was there to have been a warning strike before a total shut down.”
He also said the decision to shut down the country by marketers was not a wise decision even though th step was taken after wide consultation by the group.
“It was unpatriotic for them to shutdown the country, if this not properly investigated there could be a repeat of such, marketers should know that they are not labour unions, there was an agreement with government to pay them gradually, but they disregarded the agreement and unpatriotically threw the country into crisis,” Uba said.
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