By Kesandu Egburonu
The long-awaited Dangote refinery has finally been concluded and I must say, the scale of it is quite mind-blowing. Imagine having facilities that occupy land masses Dangote himself has boasted is “8 times the size of Victoria Island,” Lagos. That’s how massive it is. Earlier billed to be situated in Ogun state, the gigantic refinery now sits elegantly on the Lekki Free Trade Zone area of Lagos state.
It is not as though Nigeria does not have refineries of its own. It is just that the government has successfully run those refineries into the ground, so much that we majorly export our own crude oil to be refined abroad before importing it again! Wow! The mere thought of that back and forth movement exemplifies how backward we are as a country. Nowhere in the world would you find an oil producing nation with this kind of practice.
I believe that that’s the brainchild of the Dangote refinery and the main problem Nigerian Billionaire, Aliko Dangote, meant to solve when he set out on this mission. As we are informed, the refinery is going to guarantee thousands of jobs which we expect to benefit Nigerians. It has, also, been pointed out that the refinery will provide electricity for the South-West excluding Lagos state. This is quite staggering on its own.
The main extract from all of these, as well, is that we have been assured that importation of crude oil is now a thing of the past as this refinery will not only provide sufficient crude oil derivatives for internal consumption, but also have excess, enough for exportation. Brilliant!
We rolled out the red carpet and beat the drums to signal to the whole world this remarkable achievement! Social media heard of it. Hell! Even the illiterate palm wine tapper must hear of this great news. “We have arrived,” is the message.
While I do not fault anyone for celebrating what is being referred to as a “milestone,” what I do question is the timing of it. Do we realise how old Nigeria is? The country is 63-year-old! I believe the achievements of a 63 year-old man should outnumber that of a teenage high school graduate. Is that not so? If so, then, why should a refinery be a thing of such gargantuan jubilation? Are we not supposed to have achieved that decades ago for crying out loud? To think that even nations who are not oil-producing have built refineries decades ago that are still working till date. “What then is all the fuss about?” I wonder.
I do not intend to sound like an “enemy of progress.” I merely want to make sense of it all. Let me break it down. When a child is born, we celebrate, right?. The next thing we celebrate is the child sitting upright on his/her own. We move on to celebrate the child crawling from one corner of the house to the other, destroying everything in sight! Next, we celebrate the child growing teeth and then we celebrate the child taking his/her first footsteps in life. That is the sequence and there is a time frame for these feats to be achieved, or else, the alarm will go off signalling a big problem.
Now, imagine coming back from work one day only to see your neighbour holding a feast in celebration of his 5 year-old son walking: Wouldn’t you wonder if your neighbour has gone mad or something? “Was he crippled before”? would be your next question. I’m sure you might be too puzzled to even ask that. I guess you are getting my point at this stage.
Nigeria is like that 5 year-old child in my narrative and the feat of walking being celebrated is akin to that of our refinery right now. The timing makes the jubilation of it look weird. We are the Giant of Africa for crying out loud. It took a private individual to do what successive governments should have done decades ago and we are celebrating rather than weeping? Is that how mediocre we have sunk to as a nation that, what should ordinarily translate to small wins, have suddenly become heralded as a national triumph? I shake my head in disbelief.
By now, we ought to be giving financial aid to many African countries. We ought to be building refineries for other nations. We ought to have promoted Innoson motors or any other local car manufacturer to such an enviable height as to be on par with Rolls-Royce or Ferrari, but, here we are, celebrating what even lesser African countries have celebrated decades ago. The Giant of Africa. Wow!
I know some may take offence with my stance and tag me names, but, I am a man who is a staunch believer of the maxim, “to whom much is given, much is expected.” We ought to have gone past this level by now. This refinery should have been seen as just a step in the long journey of getting back to where we ought to be, not an avenue for champagne popping and glass clinking.
As a personal achievement for Billionaire, Aliko Dangote, I say this is a big win, but, for the nation Nigeria, this is nothing near spectacular. With all due respect to the Dangote Refinery, it has been long overdue. I will not join the bandwagon and celebrate mediocrity when I know my nation, Nigeria, is capable of much more than this. The Giant in us needs to wake up real fast.