A report by the Centre for the Promotion of Private Enterprise (CPPE) has said the incessant scarcity of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), vandalism of pipelines, oil theft and several other vices in the oil and gas sector are due to gross mismanagement of the industry by the Federal Government and politicians.
Describing the management of the oil sector by politicians as a disaster, and stressing that the government should reduce its hold on the industry and privatise some facilities in it, CPPE said such facilities as the four refineries being run by the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) should be privatised.
“Let’s take the oil and gas sector, for instance: that sector has been a disaster, because it is fully in the hands of government officials and politicians.
“Imagine if operators in that industry were private sector people, paying taxes and doing things efficiently, the sector would not be in the state it is now.
“It would have raked in a lot of investments, bringing in many foreign and domestic investors, more quality jobs would have been created, and our export earnings would have been fantastic. Our investments in gas and others would have gone far”, the Director, CPPE, Muda Yusuf, told The Tide source.
Yusuf stressed that because the government was the one that was largely sitting on the affairs of the sector, it had become a platform for patronage, “which is why we are in the crisis that we face today.
“Whereby every now and then we are plunged into widespread scarcity of petroleum products, oil theft, pipeline vandalism, among others”.
He stressed that privatisation might not be good for every sector, but noted that if the government could identify sectors where the private industry players had clear capacity to deliver, then the government had no business being there.
Yusuf said, “this is because if they are there, they will not be efficient, there’ll be a lot of corruption, there’ll be no investments and they will mess it up.