By Sonny Atumah
A British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell who lived between 1872 and 1970 said that science is what you know; philosophy is what you don’t know. The import of this is that many of us operate in the realm of what we do not know. If in the context of symbolic logic it would be fantastic that we try to move from the known to the unknown and vice versa. But more often than not we revel clumsily in conjectures and for too many of us no qualms.
It happens in our everyday life in Nigeria and inadequate data or lack of it has been our bane in the quest for development. Data derivable are rather guesstimates and factitious in nature. For incomprehensible reasons data are also manipulated in population census, elections, procurements, revenue sharing, petroleum consumption and subsidy claims. For these we cannot plan and implement our physical and social infrastructural needs. Many of our projects end up being abandoned because of inadequate data.
Ordinarily favourable demographics computed can be harnessed to create a virile society. Ask ten Nigerians including those in authority and power the population of Nigeria you will get ten different figures. The data for the smallest quantity of energy in Nigeria is bandied without empirical and statistical basis. It is not different in education, agriculture, health, et cetera. That is our malaise. Studies have shown that no nation stumbles into wealth and sustains it. Of course ours had not been and cannot be different.
One tried to analyse the economies of most developed nations that are either net producers or consumers of petroleum and they have one common denominator. They hold data sacred as bases for planning and development. Whatever amount of energy these countries consume is well known to all. For lack of empirical data, we conjure figures on what we consume to ascertain the differential between landing costs and pump price of petroleum products.
The nominal gross domestic products, GDP of these first 15 economies in the “trillion-dollar” club are based on accurate data. The daily finished petroleum products consumption is as follows: United States (19,530,000 bpd with PMS 9.33 mbpd ), China (11,120,000 bpd), Japan (4,120,000 bpd), Germany (2,372,000 bpd), United Kingdom (1,545,000 bpd), France (1,691,000 bpd), India (3,735,000 bpd), Italy (1,266,000 bpd), Brazil (3,144,000 bpd), Canada (2,406,000 bpd), South Korea (2,407,000 bpd), Russia (3,693,000 bpd), Australia (1,116,000 bpd), Spain (1,242,000 bpd), and Mexico (2,007,000 bpd). Our officials who are inconsistent with petroleum products consumption figures should take a leaf out of their books.
From this source Nigeria’s average consumption is 277,000 bpd. Nigeria is number four in Africa after South Africa (633,000 bpd), Algeria (430,000 bpd) (Morocco 296,000 bpd). Reliable data on petroleum business transactions for products imported are not readily available. One recalls the 2012 petroleum investigation by the Farouk Lawan ad hoc Committee of the House of Representatives on the downstream (even with its controversy), how government departments, Customs, PPPRA, NNPC, PPMC, CBN etc. all bandied different figures on PMS imported into the country for which documents were processed and payments made on subsidy.
Last week at the modular refinery discussion organised by the Modular Refiners Association of Nigeria, Nigeria’s Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu who was represented by Mr. Olumide Adekeke, a Deputy Director, Engineering and Standards in the Department of Petroleum Resources, told the gathering that the country had a refining gap of about 900,000 barrels per day to meet the daily national consumption.
Many of us were jolted at the Minister’s inconsistent figures of Nigeria’s daily consumption of refined petroleum products especially the PMS. On February 7, 2017 testifying at the House of Representatives Ad hoc Committee on the review of pump price of PMS he said our daily consumption was 28 million litres. Kachikwu, had earlier disclosed that the present administration was able to block unaccounted fraud impacted volume for petrol in 2016, which is nearly 40 per cent of the country’s consumption. According to him, the consumption of PMS has shifted from 50 million litres a day to about 28 million per day. Out of the 28 million litres Nigeria consumes he claimed the four refineries are producing 8 million litres.
If he took out 22 million litres from NNPC fraudulent practices and the refineries are producing 8 million litres it means we need 20 million litres which translates to about 270,000 barrels of crude. The National Bureau of Statistics figure was 18.81 billion litres of PMS (daily average of 51,534,246.57 litres) consumed last year. He would do the country well to tell us how he arrived at the bogus deficit of 900,000 barrels as refining gap. It means we may be close to determining our membership of Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC. Read more at: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2017/06/kachikwus-guesstimate-petrol-consumption/Front page: Lalasticlala Mynd44 |
