What do you think is responsible for the delay in actualising the Petroleum Industry Bill?

The PIB delay is infortunate. The PIB is well-intentioned for everybody involved in the industry–for the government, regulators, IOCs and the independent producers. But in structuring such s mammoth bill there is bound to be differences and divergences. I believe that the greatest problem why it is not having the blessing of majority of the stakeholders is because they are not talking to each other at all. And if they are talking perhaps they are not listening to each other.

Our refineries are not in the best shape so there is a low capacity to refine. Why are we still not able to refine products at required and appropriate levels?

The people who make policies should simply listen to the operators. We have had the telecoms revolution and even though we are yet to get the result of power privatisation, there is sill hope. I want to give an example which anybody in the oil industry can verify and validate. When the government was running Eleme Petrochemical, it was at a loss to government. I was in Agip at that time and we were the ones supplying them gas. They owed us so much for the gas we supplied to them. But no sooner it was privatised than things changed. I was reading somewhere not too long ago about the dividend they now pay to government for the 20 per cent ruminant shareholding it has. Eleme is planning on doubling its flanks and also expanding the scope of the plant. This was an establishment that was just creating losses for government at a time and was a mere drain on government revenue before it was privatised.

We have had a lot of reversals concerning the refineries. The government people involved would say give us this and give us that and we would fix it. After taking all the money, we end up with the same old story of no solution. Somebody should just be bold now to say we should privatised it, and then we will cut our losses. It’s been done in several sectors and I cannot see why this should be different.

Are there no examples of governments or states that operate refineries successfully?

In the free market economy, I doubt if there is any success story of a government that is running a refinery. There might be but I don’t know any.

Is it true that you are involved with OPEC and its activities. And are you linked in any way with the board?

No, it is not true. I was never involved with OPEC and was never on a delegation to OPEC. The only time I was on government delegation was on Climate Change. I was on the Nigerian delegation to the United Nations in 2002 on World Climate Change. And there was a follow-up meeting in Milan in 2003 that I was also part of. And I think everybody can see the issues raised on climate change are still here with us today. People were shouting themselves hoarse that if we fail to reduce carbon emission and we don’t manage resources better than we were doing it could provoke catastrophic events. And we are seeing these today.

I graduated from the University of Ibadan in 1972 and joined Nigerian Agip Oil Company that same year. And I studied Chemistry. As at that time, the University of Ibadan was not offering any engineering course. The best you could do was Chemistry, Physics, Geology etc. When I joined Nigerian Agip Oil Company, they took me to Italy that same year where I started a course on Petroleum Technology. I did that for another year and a half before coming back to start work in Nigeria.

In the course of my career I served in the laboratory for crude oil export in Brass and almost immediately that job became too small for me, as owners of the job felt. So they took me to a life-changing career, by deploying me to Budget and Operations Control. This had a very big effect on my life because it taught me about money budget, planning and particular the tying of operations to money, which is what life’s game is all about really. Unfortunately too, I did not last for too long there; I was only there for a few years, and then we entered 1978 when the oil industry and the environment became top issues in Nigeria. So I created an environment and quality control department of Nigerian Agip. And that was about the year that all other oil companies too created such outfit. And we exchanged ideas, if we had spills that were bigger than our individual capacities we learnt to cooperate.