Fuel Scarcity And Failed Energy Policy

 By Cheta Nwanze

On January 18, 2015, Nigeria’s Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke, announced a fuel price reduction that took the retail cost from N97 to N87 and explained that the price drop was occasioned by the drop in crude oil prices in the international market. An incensed Nigerian public that had set high standards for itself insisted that N87 was high regardless, refused to be placated by the price reduction and made sure the Goodluck Jonathan government was voted out, which ushered in the regime of Major General Muhammadu Buhari(retd.).

Once sworn in, Buhari looked at the country’s vast array of accomplished energy industry professionals, somehow saw himself in their midst and named himself as petroleum minister with the excuse that he needed to personally be involved for things to get done properly. Well, he has been as great a petroleum minister as he has been president.

Paradoxica Nigeriana

By Dan Amor

Nigeria is a beautiful edifice built with bricks of contradictions. Somewhere between the idea and the reality hovers a huge geographical abstraction that beguiles the imagination. Situated at the Eastern end of the Gulf of Guinea, between the 4th and the 14th Parallels, Nigeria occupies a total area of 923,768 square kilometres, slightly more than the combined areas of France and Germany. From Lagos in the South-west to Maiduguri in the North-east is the distance between London and Warsaw.

*President Buhari 

Its population estimated at about 190 million, exceeds the combined population of all other countries in the West African sub-region of the Sahara. Endowed with enormous wealth, a dynamic population and an enviable talent for political compromise, Nigeria stood out in the 1960s as the potential leader of Africa, a continent in dire need of guidance. For, it was widely thought that Nigeria was immune from the wasteful diseases of tribalism, disunity and instability that remorselessly attacked so many other new African states. But when bursts of machine gunfire shattered the pre-dawn calm of Lagos its erstwhile Federal Capital in January 1966, it was now clear that Nigeria was no exception to Africa's common post-independence experience.