“To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.” — Donald A. Adams

YOU might be wondering what the word, sakamanje, means in the headline of today’s discourse. On the street, sakamanje is a word that describes opaque dealings and manipulations of peoples and events to arrive at a predetermined destination. It is not a word that is derived from any particular language, but users of most languages spoken in Nigeria agree that it is a slang term that describes deceit. Just like the word, mugu, which describes a naive, unassuming person that is not attuned to the wiles of street players. Victims of scams are generally referred to as mugu.

Remember that the ongoing scarcity of petrol has lasted all of eight weeks till today, as you read this. When it initially started in the first week of July, many of us thought that the Nigerian state is at it again, since we’ve been experiencing scarcity of fuel since the early 70s. In fact, a naive me (mugu?) thought that the scarcity will disappear as it often did after a few days. Little did I know that all of us hapless Nigerians were to become victims of the biggest sakamanje sponsored by the state. In April this year, queues surfaced at filling stations in Abuja, and a few days later, in Lagos.

State oil monopoly, NNPCL said through its officials that the scarcity was as a result of supply chain bottlenecks which they were working hard to resolve. But a member of the Independent Marketers Association of Nigeria, IPMAN volunteered to newsmen that “the cause of the erratic supply is because the NNPCL does not have enough fuel imported. Regardless of the money or anything, the NNPCL sometimes experiences glitches in its supply. For example, at the NNPCL Jetty in Apapa, as of Saturday, there was only one tanker at ASPM which can take about 40,000 metric tonnes; the three other reception points had no PMS vessel.

“Whenever the NNPCL has disruptions in importation, we start having these issues. They will try hard to manage it, but it will later blow open. Last week, they said it was a result of logistics, but this is not about logistics; it’s about glitches in importation.”

A similar tale by moonlight was told in July when the current bout of scarcity started. We were told that the problem had to do with the depots, where tankers go to load petrol. I use the Apapa-Oshodi Expressway daily as I drive to work at Vanguard, and I see tankers parked on the expressway, bumper-to-bumper, as we say here, from as early as Iyana-Isolo to Apapa. So it looked as if it the tankers were having issues with entry to the depots. It would later turn out to a ruse, as the serial incidents of petrol scarcity seemed to have been orchestrated.

As scarcity persisted, people spent hours on queues. Many who could not afford to spend longer time than necessary to get petrol, preferred to buy at any price thrown at them. So, the black market thrived, and price per litre jumped from the N568 at NNPC filling stations, first, to N700 per litre, later N800, and finally N1,000 in the black markets as the scarcity refused to abate. The observant reader would have noticed that in the last eight weeks, most NNPC filling stations had no petrol, leaving users at the mercy of independent marketers who sold at prices much higher than that of the NNPC Retail — N650, N680, N700, N820, etc. How come NNPC Retail stations had no petrol and other marketers had?

This is where Nigerians did themselves in, simply because they had more disposable income than the man next door. In the midst of it all, government, seeing that heavens were not falling as people bought petrol at far higher than the official price, activated its system and raised the price, officially, from N568 to N885. Still, many NNPC Retail stations do not have the product, but other marketers have, and are selling at N920, N980, N1,100, and other outrageous prices. That was the first leg of the sakamanje. The scarcity was contrived to drive prices up, and Nigerians fell for the gambit. It is still on-going; many NNPC Retail stations still do not have the product, but many other marketers have, indicating that we have not reached where government is going with petrol price hike.

In all of this, government has the International Monetary Fund, IMF, on it side, which, during the week, said that the price of petrol in Nigeria is not market-reflective. Read that to mean that a further increase in the price of petrol is coming — Stage 2 of the sakamanje. If not, why is the product not available despite price increase? Why have the queues not disappeared as have been the case with “ordinary petrol scarcity” ?

It is clear that the major thing driving price of petrol imported into Nigeria is the exchange rate. Flotation of the Naira, which currently puts the value of our currency at nearly N1,700 to the US Dollar is mightily deleterious to the health of the economy, and by extension, the health of all Nigerians. That’s why it is a sin to fall sick in Nigeria now as one will not be able to afford the cost of drugs. With the exchange rate, even at N1,000 per litre, government will still have to subsidise. And for fellow compatriots who are looking forward to petrol from Dangote Refinery to crash prices, they will be disappointed as Dangote had bought loads of crude from government at global prices denominated in US Dollars.

Even the directive to sell to Dangote in Naira is yet to take effect, and NNPC will charge naira equivalent of global crude prices. Dangote will have to recover costs, and allow for profit to remain in business. Road closed in that direction. The only solution is for government, with the interest of its citizens at heart, to GIVE out crude for refining at heavily discounted prices domestic consumption. That will be the real subsidy. Can Tinubu do that? In fact, will he be willing to do that? Ask him, and get back to me. TGIF.