Buhari, Jonathan: Who Should Take Credit For Revamping PH, Warri Refineries, Others?

(L-R) Buhari and Jonathan

After years of being in comatose ( including the years former president Olusegun Obasanjo was the minister of petroleum resources for eight years), the Port Harcourt and Warri refineries have been turned around for refining of petroleum products. It was also gathered that the Kaduna Refinery in few months’ time will join them in refining petroleum products. All these were performed by Nigerian engineers.

How did this come about? When former president, Dr Goodluck Jonathan made effort to get the Japanese and Russian companies (the countries that built the refineries) to come and turnaround the refineries, he was told that the amount of money required to turnaround the refineries would be enough to build new refineries given the latest development in technology in the sector. Given this option President Jonathan summoned meeting of the engineers of the NNPC and challenged them to use their technological knowhow to turnaround the refineries. The challenged Nigerian engineers went to work and the result is what we are seeing today.

Now it so happened that the refineries are coming on stream when the man who initiated it had been voted out and all of a sudden, the credit has been appropriated by supporters of President Muhammadu Buhari (note: NOT BY BUHARI ) as one of the achievements of the president since taking over on May 29, 2015.

It was apparently in reaction to this that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) national publicity secretary, Chief Olisa Metuh had to issue a statement lamenting that achievements of Jonathan are being appropriated by the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).

Turning around a refinery is not like taking your car for service where you drive in and the mechanic tells you the parts you need to change and you dash through the other side of the street at the spare parts shop and buy the necessary parts. In the case of refineries some worn out parts can only be manufactured for you on request, sometimes taking months to be manufactured and supplied. This could not have been accomplished by a government that has admitted that it was slow in taking off because the handover note by his predecessor was scanty. Unless of course if the handover note with respect to the oil sector was very detailed. Even at that it would be a miracle of monumental proportion for a government that was barely two months old with no minister of petroleum to drive the sector, to claim responsibility for revamping the refineries.

I believe that President Muhammadu Buhari would emerge a very successful president, better than previous presidents before him, because this is the first time Nigeria is electing a president who wanted to be president and had contested presidential elections unsuccessfully on three occasions before his latest victory in 2015. Buhari does not need any help from any of his supporters to manufacture achievements for him. His achievements are coming and I have no doubt that it would be profound. Especially in the area of strengthening our institutions in line with President Barack Obama’s admonition that what Africa needs is strong institutions and not strong leaders.

Similarly it would wrong for the APC to take credit for Nigeria kicking out polio. It was a collective victory of all Nigerians across political divides. APC states in the South West ensured that every kid in the zone were vaccinated, so also the PDP states in the South-South and South East. It was the same story in the north, even though there were pockets of opposition to the polio vaccine in parts of the north (APC and PDP states), but the intervention of traditional institutions like the Sultan of Sokoto and the Emirs who joined the campaign to help eradicate the virus from our country helped in salvaging the situation. It would therefore be inappropriate to attribute this victory to the new government. But since Jonathan takes responsibility for all that was wrong with his administration, it would be unfair to deny him its successes.

It is in the same vein that Jonathan has to take credit for the success the country recorded in curtailing the spread of ebola virus in the country especially at a time that the United States government denied Nigerian government experimental drugs for our patients, just like they denied Nigeria weapons to fight Boko Haram. I have heard people argue that it was APC states (Rivers and Lagos) that were instrumental to curtailing the spread, but without federal government support, manpower and financial muscle, it would have spread to other parts of Nigeria.  The World Health Organisation (WHO) understands the critical role played by the federal government in curtailing the spread that was why the certificate of Ebola Free Nigeria was presented to federal government and not to either Lagos or Rivers states governments.

I know that the 2015 general election was ran on the premise that Jonathan had never achieved anything tangible in six years ( which was a lie) ditto the PDP in 16 years, but the elections are over. Let us have honest analysis of the state of our country under Jonathan even as we look forward to the great future that hopefully Buhari would engender in the next four years or eight years as the case may be.