Posted on: 09:43 Thu, 10 Mar 2016



Femi Adesina, the Special Adviser on
Media and Publicity to President
Muhammadu Buhari, was guest on
Radio Continental programme on
Friday last week (March 4, 2016).

Below are excerpts from the
interview:-

Nigerians are not happy about
some things that we seem not to
have gotten right. One of it is the
issue of power supply. Service has
deteriorated, yet people are made
to cough out large sums of money
monthly as tariffs.?

On the issue of power, it seems
Nigerians are their own problems.

You can recall about four weeks
ago, the power ministry came out
to say that the megawatts we had
was 5070, which is an all-time high
in 16 years. A few days after, some
people blew installations in
Bayelsa, we lost about 1600
megawatts immediately. After that,
installation was blown in Delta and
we lost another 1,000 megawatts.

What would the government do in
that kind of circumstance? If the
people who should be provided
power are the ones sabotaging
installations, they can’t turn round
to say government is not providing
power. Nigerians need to
determine what they want. If South
Africa has about 50,000 megawatts,
it is because their own people are
not sabotaging their installations,
they are not going to blow up the
lines. If Nigerians continue to blow
up and sabotage, then they can’t
come around to say that there is no
power.

Are you saying that government is
helpless in terms of protecting this
vital infrastructure, with the security
agencies we have?

Government is not helpless, and
government should never be
helpless. A government that is
worth its’ salt should never be
helpless, but there are so many
things that the government can
deploy attention to, and when the
attention is focused on securing
installation instead of what we can
call other weightier matters of the
law. It is just a waste of time. We
are wasting our time as a country,
because other countries don’t have
that distraction, they don’t have to
deploy troops to monitor
installations, because nobody
would sabotage installations since
he knows the thing is for his own
good. I think, in this country we
need to get to a point where we
should realize that when we do
certain things, we are hurting
ourselves and not the government.

What is the panacea to end recurring
fuel queues, especially with the issue
of building new refineries?
Let me try to put in perspective the
fuel supply situation in the country.

What caused the latest round of
queues is that there is a breach in
supply, which came from two ends.

One, from the importation end and
two, from the distribution end in
the country. We have NNPC
bringing in 70 per cent of fuel used
in the country and the other 30 per
cent is supposed to be provided by
independent marketers. The
independent marketers are not
really doing much because of the
differential in dollar rate currently.

Before they can import, they expect
government to do something in
terms of dollar differential; but
government is limited because we
are not earning much dollar.

The only way Nigerian government
gets dollar is through sale of crude
oil, and we know that price has
gone continuously down, that is
what caused the breach in supply,
because everything is imported. We
are not refining much most times;
and added to that is the fact that
Europe is in winter. During winter,
you cannot predict importation as
in other seasons of the year,
because there are some parts of the
world where the seas are virtually
frozen and ships can’t sail. A ship
that you could predict would arrive
after 30 days during summer,
would arrive at 40-45 days because
of the vagaries of the weather. This
is another thing that affected
importation into the country.

There is this third issue, which is
very important because it links to
what we have said earlier. All these
ships that bring in fuel are insured
internationally, and international
insurers are refusing to insure
ships going to Port-Harcourt and
Warri because of the aggressiveness
in the area. They follow all these
things, all these pipelines that are
vandalised and all of that, they
follow. Therefore, those ships land
in Lagos, and then you transport
fuel by road to those areas. All
these are complexities about our
country that need to be looked at. I
have said that Nigerians themselves
must decide to address these
complexities.

What is your answer on the issue of
stipend of N5, 000 to the vulnerables
or graduates because there seems to
be contradiction. Is government
paying because it is included in the
budget?

There are two things we need to
isolate. There is this notion that
government was meant to pay
N5,000 for unemployed graduates.

That was the popular notion and
that was what the President
corrected, that instead of paying
N5,000 to unemployed graduates,
he would rather provide
infrastructure, he would rather
give them enabling environment to
be useful than giving out dole to
them. But there is one that is
already captured in the budget, it is
called the conditional cash transfer,
which is going to be given to the
poorest of the poor.

Nigerians are complaining about many
things. Is the government aware?

I think Nigerians have always
complained, and we should learn to
stop complaining and believe more.
If you have elected a government
because you believe it can bring
change;(because these complains
started from the first month), and
you have not allowed them to
isolate what the problems are, and
articulate what the solutions would
be, and you begin to have all these
complaints, I think it is not natural.

What government needs at a time
like this, is cooperation and
support.

The President said this at an
interview last week. He said things
deteriorated over 16 years that PDP
was in power, this is the ninth
month of this government, and you
want everything to have changed. It
is not real. There must be realistic
expectation, and realistic
expectation will demand that
people are patient, supportive, and
encourage the government. This is
a government that is working for
the people. Somebody said two days
ago that this is a government that is
“pro-poor”, which is true. Then, all
these complaints would not do
anybody any good. Rather than
complaining, let us cooperate,
support and encourage.

The promised change would come.
Don’t forget that our President said
it would take a minimum of 18
months to revive the economy.

Nigerians don’t listen to something
like that, they want magic
immediately. It doesn’t happen that
way. This change will come, but it
would follow a process, and it
would be enduring.