The Federal Government has been advised to be more proactive in addressing the fragile Niger Delta situation in order to engender the required peace and stability needed to support the growth of oil and gas production which would in turn boost the country’s Gross Domestic Product.
Government is also urged to privatise the refineries which have become drain pipes in its hands, as they have largely remained dysfunctional for several years with no hope of government having the financial resources to revamp them.
Austin Avuru, managing director of Seplat Petroleum Development Company, lamented the seeming insensitivity of government to happenings in the Nigeria Delta region which are undermining its critical oil production capacity.
Avuru, who spoke at the BusinessDay Economic Outlook 2018, also lamented the rate at which the government is borrowing from external sources to finance its projects, adding that there are policies that could have been put in place to make her get such monies locally. “We are borrowing heavily and understandably so, government policies that would have generated large sums of money without the need to borrow have been initiated,” he said.
Such policies he said could fetch the government about $20 billion. The sales of the refineries alone, he said, could generate about $2 billion.
“What is the point of keeping a refinery that has been working at between 7-30 percent in the past 10 years?” he asked.
He queried the need for investing in pipelines when they would not be efficiently run.
“Why would the govt invest so much money in gas pipelines, to be managed by the same agencies, when in fact recapitalisation and selling them will raise the country $1 billion dollars.”
He said if the government has the political will and the courage to implement all these, she can easily make billions of dollars and there would be no need to borrow. He urged government to get its policies right, adding that subsidising petrol and other market driven commodities is not the way to go.
“The electricity sector presently has a gap of N200 billion dollars and this is a huge gap and the sector is almost nearing collapse just because the government does not have the courage to allow the market to drive the tariff. What economy will survive when you borrow to subsidise?”
In his own comment Opeyemi Agbaje, urged the government to privatise the refineries, saying that there would not be queues if refineries were privatised.
He said “we should be worried about the state of the economy,” and urged the government to have a balanced approach towards economic policies which create a more private sector driven economy.
