 You're welcome back. It's still the Breakfast on Plus TV Africa and right now we're taking our first hot topic and that is the fact that federal government has granted six firms license to import petroleum products into the country. Okay, we are being joined by Nick Agulay, a public affairs analyst. Good morning and welcome to the program Nick. Good morning. Good morning to Nigeria's. Okay. Well, we've been told that six companies, that is five, including Dangote refineries have been given licenses to import petrol into the country. Let's begin with that. How does that make you feel? I wish me to feel very happy because this shows that Nigeria is now ready for business. And this is what we have been advocating all the time for a total deregulation of the downstream sector. And this step that has not been taken is what is now going to make Nigerians to pay the correct price for petrol. And I believe that if there is total deregulation and competition is allowed in the sector, then Nigerians will buy a little petrol at far less than the current 500 plus that the NNPC is forcing down our troops as a monopoly. Okay, but does it not worry you? In the report ISO, maybe there are other reports that have names, but the report ISO, these people, these companies, the six companies were not named. Recall that last week or so, the House of Reps rejected the call or the move by one of the members of the House to suspend the license that was given to Dangote to be the sole importer of petrol into the country. Even though NNPCL has said that they don't have that power to give those licenses, that they didn't give Dangote the license, the House of Reps rejected the motion. How do you reject the motion of something that is not existing? Which means that it does exist, that he was given that kind of a license by whom we may not know, but he was given that kind of a license. And now this report has shown or has told us that six firms, that is including Dangote, will now have that power to import in July. That all, so many other people applied for it, they can also import on later days, but the people who were ready to import in July were six, that is including Dangote. Does it not worry you that it is shrouded in the kind of secrecy that we don't want at this time? It worries me. And the two aspects that you have addressed, both of them will worry me. First and foremost, the one on the House of Representatives. I think they have started off very badly. And there is time for them to take, to have everything and ask themselves what are they in that House of Representatives for? Are they there for themselves or they are there for the Nigerian people? Because if they are there for themselves, then they should better pack their bags and go home so that those who will be there for the Nigerian people should come in. You cannot factor that emotion was before the House to say that the NNPC giving a so important license to a company whether Dangote or any company, and that kind of emotion to reject such a license insurance is being rejected by the House of Representatives. Why are they rejecting it? Why? Is it that the so important can now continue from where the NNPC left by forcing down our troops, prizes that are in-built with a lot of inefficiencies or what? So they also represented this for me. They have started off on a very wrong footing and it's time for them to correct their steps. I would have preferred that they accepted the motion to reject that so important license and then it turned out to be that there was even no license that was issued. But by not even knowing whether there was a license or not for them to reject, there is just no basis for that. They should be working for the Nigerian people because ultimately it's the Nigerian people who will suffer these inefficiencies that we have been forced down to suffer by the NNPC. So that's about the House. Then about the second aspect that you have taken which is the lack of transparency. Again it worries me. People in government should understand that they think government for themselves. They are in government as servants of the people. That is why they are called civil servants or public servants. It looks as if that name servant is lost on them. If you are a servant, you are bound to report your master. You know, there is no way they can issue such an amorphous statement and say we have issued import licenses to cis companies and don't name the companies. We are the masters of these servants. They should report to us who these companies are so that we on our own can do due diligence of these companies and go and check the background of these companies and know whether these companies are genuine businesses or they are some sort of shared companies that have been set up by people who want to continue to object us and loot us as they were doing with the few subsidies. So I am not happy that the downstream authority have shrouded in secrecy the companies that they say they have awarded these license to. And I would also like to say that cis companies is not enough. Cis companies is not enough. Cis companies will still constitute a cater. But we license about 50 to 100 companies to import petrol. We are not going to see through competition. And for so long as we don't see through competition, we are not going to pay the right prices at the time. I mean at the pump. And that is what Nigeria means. We need to pay the right prices at the pump and not believe that the right prices would be far less than the 500 Naira per liter that we're buying now. Yeah. It's another thing they said is that NNPC, what the spokesman said is that NNPC has 30 days fuel sufficiency. So there will be no gap. So in July, these six companies are going to import fuel while NNPC will supply the nation with this fuel that they have in stock. Now the question is when did they buy this fuel that is in stock that they are going to sell to Nigerians. Was it when the subsidy was still being paid? And if the subsidy was still being paid by a country, the subsidy was still paid by tax payers money. And then NNPC is now selling at the price. They will start selling. They have already started selling at a new pump price. Why are they short changing us? Is it possible that we can monitor and make sure that there's more transparency in this regime, that the new regime that has come of us surviving without fuel subsidy? Okay. They have bought fuel for 30 days in July. They are going to have sufficient fuel. They have given licenses to six companies. But this fuel must have been bought when there was subsidy. Why are they suffering Nigerians? What can Nigerians do in the face of this kind of situation? I think you touched on a very important topic there. And this is what we have always said. You see, if we go back a few days ago, President Inigo on May 29th made his inaugural speech where he said subsidy is gone or he does not have the budget for subsidy. And the following day, the 38th of May, the NNPC hikes the price of petrol from about 180 to 195 to 500, 540, 550 depending on which region. And to me, that was totally unfair on the NNPC to engage in such a business practice. Because as I did date that President Inigo made his inaugural speech, the NNPC would have carried at least 30 days of fuel sufficiency, which is what they are now conferencing to us. And it would have made that those 30 days fuel supply had subsidy on them. And remember, the budget for 2023 has gone subsidy all the way to 38th of June. So today, maybe the 21st of June, we still have budget provision for subsidy for another week plus. And in all these, the NNPC then decides that they are going to post on Nigerians a hike in the price of petrol, regardless of the fact that the petrol that they are now selling at 500 and something, Naira, was imported under the subsidy regime and subsidy was paid on it. So these are the kind of sharp practices that are unfortunately a government owned company that should be protecting the citizens because we are the owners of the NNPC. Well, we are the owners of the NNPC. A lot of people even misconstrued NNPC to be like a regulator. The NNPC is not a regulator in the petroleum industry. The regulator in the petroleum industry used to be the Department for Petroleum Resources, GPR. But the PIA, the Petroleum Industry Act, actually split the regulator into the upstream commission and the downstream authority. So the NNPC for its upstream business is being regulated by the upstream commission and then for its downstream business by the downstream authority. The NNPC is just like Shell or Chevron or Mobile. The NNPC is a company that is expected to be running business. You know, the NNPC shouldn't be the one that should be controlling the petroleum sector. They are just one of the companies and the shares and mobiles and Chevrons and totals are their competitors. And the ownership of the NNPC is by Nigerians. We are the owners of Nigerian army of the NNPC. So how can the company that we own continue to perpetrate this kind of shark practices upon us? I think President Tunibu has started well. He is placing all the areas that have been pinning us down in the past and the next place he needs to look at is the NNPC. I believe that the entire management of the NNPC has had to leave their usefulness. They should be allowed to go home and rest so that new people who have the vision of the president should come into the saddle and run NNPC like a business and run NNPC for the benefit of Nigerians and not the benefit of a few people who have been subjugating us and looting the common word and even now we can see the transparency that is coming in as simple as naming the six companies that have been given the licenses. We don't know them. So the NNPC structure as we have it now has to leave this usefulness. Okay but aside from the fact that we're talking petroleum and all that in this the new era we're talking electric cars we're talking some renewable energy we're talking solar systems and all that. Yesterday I even saw a video clip on the social media where someone was using a tree to generate electricity I think yeah a tree to generate electricity and which means the alternative means of doing a lot of things nowadays. Do you really think what we're spending so far in in this exploring for oil and every other thing is worth it? Shouldn't we be branching off to other things how to get our energy and how to run our cars? Because even a company a car company in Nigeria is already looking at running cars on gas and then others are thinking about electricity to run cars and all that. Is it really worth it all the the hullabaloo about petroleum? Okay so this is an interesting conversation and it's very important that we should be having this conversation. There is something that is called the energy mix. The energy mix means the different sources is like bringing in different ingredients into a pot and cooking your soup. So the different sources of energy how they are mixed to ensure that a nation has uninterrupted power supply and also a nation has in abundance all the needed energy requirements for that nation and you will see that globally fossil fuels which is what crude oil is called and gas is called. They are still carrying a large chunk of the energy mix. Also globally as we speak today there are companies that are still taking final investment decisions to think otherwise or to build families or to build all the other infrastructure that we ensure that crude oil is produced. However the renewable energy as part of the mix is also growing in importance and influence. So it's going to take a while for the coexistence of the fossil fuels and renewable energies as a mix. So as there is a declining share of fossil fuels there will be an increasing share of renewable energy. But as we speak today 2023 we cannot just uproot fossil fuels and throw them into the trash can. They are still very important especially for gas. The gas is still supplying the greatest chunk over 70% of electricity in the world as we speak today and you spoke about gas and gas that's what is called compressed natural gas CNG. It's something we should also be looking at other nations are using this. You spoke about electric gas it's something that is also coming up if we use gas to generate electricity and then use them in the gas we will totally avoid crude oil we will totally avoid petrol in our cars. But these things require money they require investment and in Nigeria we are not having enough of this investment and that is because the business climate in Nigeria is not right and so what the current government needs to do is to ensure that they fix those things that are making Nigeria not to be a beautiful bride to invest money. As we speak today there are trillions of dollars of investor funds that are floating around the world. The world is no longer having boundaries when it comes to investment and financials and all of that and Nigeria a market of over 200 million people a country with almost no natural disasters a country with beautiful fertile Arab land a country with all sorts of energy sources. We have the winds all over the place we have waters you know every community in Nigeria has a river around it not far from it. So we should tap into these terms. Nigeria should open itself up we are guaranteed and I'm looking at the solar panels you are showing there we are guaranteed about eight to ten hours of pure sunshine every day that is one of the countries like the UK don't have the UK during winter they don't even see the sun for two hours that is why you see all the trees shed their leaves and and all of that but they are not seeing enough sunshine but in Nigeria we see sunshine every day so we should and the the other good thing that has happened is that President Chinibu has kicked the ball rolling he has signed into law the electricity bill so how an electricity act now and the input of that act is that only before where electricity generation transmission and distribution were solely in the hands of the federal government now it has been liberalized such that states and local government corporate entities and individuals communities can generate and distribute electricity within their within their clients and and and that is a very good one but I also want to tell the federal government that as we speak today the federal government is the one that owns most of the infrastructure in the two city generation and the federal government President Chinibu needs to take the next step haven't signed the electricity act he now needs to take the next step by looking at the current structure of the electricity sector in Nigeria that has been delivering to us 3,000 megawatts of electricity for so long 3,000 megawatts of electricity is so abysmal for 200 million people look the the tiny nation of Qatar that hosted the World Cup the last time Qatar population is about three million and three million is population of and most states in Nigeria have more than three million people and Qatar's electricity generation transmission and distribution is 8,500 megawatts per day 8,500 megawatts for three million people and we are giving three mega three thousand megawatts 200 million people doesn't make sense I mean you look at a nation of brazil that has a similar population to us over 200 million people brazil has supplied 150,000 megawatts of electricity every day to the economy check 150,000 and our 3,000 our 3,000 is so abysmally low he's not be allowed to even last for any longer and we we have electricity stranded in a federally controlled electricity sector president tinu boon needs to go in there that should be one place he needs to go to because to be honest if you don't have sufficient power supply there's nothing you can do to economy it will never go okay this will be a good place to leave it president tinu boon has kicked the ball rolling we do hope that the ball is not rolling to offside or corner kick or penalty where we will be shooting ourselves in the foot but we do hope that things will get better and better but you touched on power and all that what do you think is the reason hindering the development of this alternative means of power generation and all that in Nigeria that you think now that you are advising the government what they need to do to make sure these things come to come to be because we have sufficient sunlight as you said we have sufficient water bodies we have everything that we need to generate power alternative power sources and all that and we're still operating on a 3000 megawatts electricity in this our country what do you think are the things that need to be removed if we need to get to that point you are wanting us to get to thank you very much for that question it's very important that the the people who have come into government now should hear us out you know the first thing they have to do that i have to open Nigeria off of business Nigeria needs to be opened up for business and the different aspects i have to open Nigeria off of business include our security nobody wants to bring their staff and their money into a company in a country where they can be kidnapped and nothing will happen so the government has to tackle security yes a presidential book has now changed the service chiefs and the other heads of security agencies we hope those guys are going to keep the ground running and other things like the ease of doing business how easy is it to incorporate a company how easy is it to get licensing how easy is it to to get government officials to do this those are the kind of things that needs to be done but then in the very short term the low-hugging food that we have is the existing infrastructure that is there we had the generating companies most of them now privatized we had the transmission which is government controlled and we had the distribution companies president in a group needs to call a conference of all the stakeholders in this electricity sector to understand what the issues are to ask a singular question why are we giving 3000 megawatts and what can we do immediately to increase that to at least 10 000 in the short term and one thing I would tell him is that generation was privatized and it was privatized to business people like octet dollars and the Tony Lumerus of this world they can bring money in there and generate more but the bottleneck is transmission because the transmission is in the hands of government and government is not investing there the generation cannot generate more than transmission can carry and distribution cannot distribute what transmission has been giving them so one of the first steps that president Nibu needs to take now is to privatize the transmission sector totally privatize take regulations let financial capital come in expertise the engineering everything to expand that transmission network to at least 30 000 megawatts in the next one or two years and then generation will start will start pushing enough power through the transmission network but then there is a big issue with distribution distribution companies were sold to politically exposed persons and president Nibu needs to go into that sector either these guys who don't have the money or the expertise to you know actually develop the distribution sector we now either have to be forced to have technical partnerships with people who can come in and do it or those licenses have to be cancelled and new licenses issued to people who have the way with them to do it you see the difference between the privatization of the distribution sector and the telecoms is that the telecoms where the licenses were sold to operators in the telecom sector the mts and the enters and that is why they are doing better in the distribution this thing was sold to politicians who never had a pay degree in the power sector and they had just been you know sitting on those licenses and increasing our tariffs you know when you hear cost-reflective tariffs what we are saying here is that the cost of running the electricity sector is rising but not the output so if you look at the equation the unit cost of electricity which is total cost divided by the megawatts megawatts has remained 3000 as a denominator why the numerator which is the cost of running has been rising rising because we used to have one network you know and one managing director now we have how many generation companies with so many managing director how many distribution company you hear just disco ekeja disco listen these are all managing directors we all set up executive directors with all the distance that is rising the cost and nigerians keep getting additional tariffs additional tariffs whereas the output which is what should be increasing to reduce the unit cost has remained 3000 megawatts so president tini who just needs to go into that sector and just he needs to desegregate that sector he needs to unbundle it he needs to just open it up to world global capital to come in and just generate electricity for nigeria if president tini will succeed in his in his four years tenure to increase the electricity supply from 3000 megawatts to 30 000 megawatts nigeria economy with jackoff he won't even need to do anything the private sector will just carry on and you will not even believe this is nigeria again the jobs created it will be unbelievable well before we round off you said something about regulators or in the in the petroleum sector being split into two and there are now the regulators will you be comfortable if the people or those groups or those agencies are still the regulators or if we are talking about removing subsidy and privatizing or whatever we need to do in the in the oil sector do you think a different body should run or should yes should take up the responsibility of guiding that sector to where it should be or it should still be the people who are regulating it right now because they were there before the deregulation and they are still here after the deregulation are you comfortable with them being at the helm of affairs the the the structure itself the these two regulators that we have now for the petroleum industry that is the upstream commission and the downstream authority which were created by the PIA as structures they are they are okay the structures are there the reissue are the people who are running these structures look if i give someone a BMW car now the BMW car itself will be a super car a very efficient car but the driver of that car one can either one can crash that car because he's he's managing the car very badly and the other can actually travel with that car for years without any problem and so what is happening is that the people who are running these regulatory agencies are the ones that need to be changed you know they they haven't delivered from Nigeria like i speak to you now and i was reading here in a report about this majority of petrol stations in Nigeria are not giving consumers the liter of petrol that they have paid for you pay for one liter of petrol at 500 plus and what goes into your tank is less than the liter and the person who is supposed to ensure that Nigerians are not scammed in that way is the downstream authority and the downstream authority have offices all over Nigeria in every state of Nigeria they are there ask the officers in this in this authority if they came to work today as they are at work as we speak now why are they allowing Nigeria to be scammed but operations but not giving us the the the liter that we paid for so what happens there is leadership if the leadership of this you know you you cannot have new wine and then put it in old wine skins if you have new wine you must put there or rather you cannot have new wine skins and we put in old wine you have to have new wineskins and new wine put inside so since we now have these two brands new regulatory agencies government also needed to assort away their leadership and bring a leadership that is now going to use these structures these legal instruments that we now have to ensure that Nigerians get their just due from the petroleum sector all right that's what's needed my president needs to go there all right uh nick thank you so much as usual for giving us insight into this topic we're very grateful that you were able to make it this morning thank you okay we've been talking with nick agule public affairs analyst we were looking at the fact that federal government has granted six firms licenses to import petroleum products into the country and sundry other issues that we were able to delve into we'll take a short break now when we return it will be time for sports stay with us