Ogbeni GGA,
I need a handle by which to address you in what promises to be a lively match.
Tossing of racquets across the net shall provoke WTF fines payable on the spot (and not by credit card - cash is king, all others come back tommorrow; and tommorrow never comes)
Agreed to your suggested rules of the contest:
- The polity of Nigeria
- Economics and
- Leave out religion
(by the way salvation is not religion but truth - Ouch ! as I await your response to that dig which I could not resist).
We must also acknowledge that technology has a role to play in our debate, so I'm glad that we belong to the same profession of engineers.
Thanks for asking about the bid I went to submit. The parastatal says we should expect a reply within six months (that's Naija for you).
I also acknowledge that there will be a cyber audience to this debate. I will be keeping my class group posted as valuable contributions will come from the floor. Our objective is to educate for change, so the more the merrier.
Game goes 0-0 as they say.
First point of correction, the branch of the family tree from which I descend is the one that went into Classics and not Forestry and Agriculture so you'e just a shade off the mark even though in cultural terms he could as well be my father as he's my biological father's younger brother and incidentally has more grey hair.
This is relevant because my impatience with the Nigerian polity is well expressed in some of the the latin phrases I learnt at home eg. 'Timus fungit' - Times flies; and do I hear you reply a la Field House - Nil Desperandum - Never Despair, give Bro. Aremu a chance. To which I respond Sieze the day (_____ diem). My latin fails me. {editors note: Carpe is the word PJ was looking for}
Please do not quote back to me that fallback of capitalism which say 'graviora quadem sunt remedia periculis' - Some medicine is worse than the ailments; by which they condemn a few generations to the early graveyard in the pursuit of prosperity down the line as they say 'freedom is coimg tommorrow'. My argument according to Fela Ransome Kuti (deceased) is that tommorrow is too late.
I digress.
Yes, it is easy to state what the citizens of Nigeria need by way of infrastructure and other public goods. By God I need those things as well. But my view point is that we have not yet identified the best means of delivering said goods. ie. the best means of government - by government I mean the representative determination of the collective will of majority, which we have seldom had in Nigeria.
Bro. Aremu found out two weeks ago that despite his having won a civilian election, he can quickly fall out of being the popular representatitive of the majority.
While not singularly targeting the poor guy in his person, he wears the crown for now so he must also bear the brunt of my venom.
I believe that I will be objective enough to judge him on his own performance and against his own criteria and not those of his predecessors.
Let us not mince words and go on to specifics so that our debate will have substance and action will be taken.
I'm sure you read in Bro. Aremu's fuel increase appology speech that one of the reasons that the state of fuel in the country is as it is, is because two of the refineries maintenance contracts were given by previoius administrations to contractors who could not perform and that those contracts could not be revoked due to the enormity of financial liabilities the state would incur.
If we go with this line of thinking, someone should ask the man why he cancelled the contract for the refurbishment of Egbin Power station which had been awarded under close scrutiny by the Abubakar regime, and then re-awarded it to Marubeni which admittedly is the OEM of the Power Station.
The man is full of inconsistencies and therein lies the Archilles Heel of his Transparency Initiatives.
Take the example also of the case of public power supply to Lagos State that had enlisted ENRON having come out tops in a bid which involved ABB and Siemens to feed into the national grid.
After much equivocation, our man Aremu who had been gallivanting the world seeking foreign direct investment sits on a panel which is unable (or unwilling) to employ the services of said foreign direct investment which has now been sitting on his own shores for about six months now. Is this guy for real ?
Rather than play the role of agba in the stand-off between Lagos State and NEPA over ENRON, he further goes ahead to threaten the activity of one specific fdi in the power sector by saying that the nation would now start-up the idle generating capacities available at ALSCON, which was topical in the news at that time and which indeed is one of the Federal Govt parastatals with idle power capacity.
To date, has that been done ? No. It was only mentioned to scare ENRON away and goes not show that while NEPA may be a monopoly, the Federal Government itself is the one that has the power of cost sub-additivity in power generation. They have means of generation beyond NEPA but Bro. Aremu prefers to use this as a big stick rather than supply his citizens.
I guess that the issue of ENRON is currently being resolved and overgrown egos in NEPA are currently being massaged, what about said solution from the mouth of the head of state himself ie. starting up idle capacity to feed into the national grid.
I can tell you that when this guys make such statements they forget that there are a number of informed people in the country who can see their lies through their teeth. Not only ALSCON, but also Eleme Petrochemicals, and Savannah Sugar have installed idle capacity currently and we are talking of locations where the citizenry dwell in darkeness. Port Harcourt and Yola.
I happen to know also that the award of Kaduna Refinery's Turn Around Maintenance to Total International was strewn with so much controversy plainly because certain individuals at that time did not want the status quo to change and the contract to return to the OEM.
The Total contract was based on a maintenance audit carried out about 18 months before it was awarded and after which the terms of reference had changed - most significantly there was yet another fire incident in the refinery after the maintenance audit was carried out.
Poor Total!
I visited the site a few times because I was also nosing around for a 'feed my face' contract and I met with the Project Manager.
The guy was rueing the day he woke up and was told that he was going to Nigeria as Project Manager. He was praying for the nightmare to end!
Electric cables, bearings etc had been stocked under the sun and rain for months and these were the items he was expected to use to execute the contract.
When he cried foul, he was reminded that the terms of the contract precluded their being
supplier as well... and the story goes on till today.
Guides
