By Abiodun Alade– Nigeria, it has often been said, is a land where paradox has become a way of life. Here is a nation that pumps millions of barrels of crude oil from its bowels each day yet has spent decades importing the fuel that drives its battered Danfos, sleek SUVs, and ever-thirsty generators. It is like watching a baker sell flour and then queue up to buy bread or like a fisherman begging for fish stew. For those middlemen who styled themselves as oil marketers, this absurdity was no tragedy. It was, in fact, the golden goose.
Scarcity was their ally, inefficiency their business partner, and government subsidy their ever-generous uncle. They built empires not by producing value but by mastering the art of waiting. Yes, waiting for licences, waiting for forex allocations, waiting for the next loophole to appear in Nigeria’s leaky oil barrel. Like Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, they flourished in decay, finding comfort in a system where dysfunction was not a bug but the business model itself.
Marketers strutted and fretted their hour upon the stage, enriching themselves while the audience, the Nigerian public paid the ticket price in queues, inflated prices, and black-market chaos.
Investment in refining? Too risky. Diversification into renewables? Too futuristic. Why build when you could game the system? As long as imports flowed and government cheques cleared, the script remained the same.
For half a century, the downstream oil sector was a theatre of dysfunction. Its actors knew their lines well, the ritual of scarcity, the dance of subsidy, the backroom exchange of forex.
Then came Aliko Dangote, with a refinery the size of a small city, and quietly rearranged the furniture. Or, to borrow from Spencer Johnson’s boardroom fable Who Moved My Cheese, he didn’t just move the cheese, he carted it off in bulk, rebranded it, and set up a supermarket.
The Dangote Petroleum Refinery is not just infrastructure. It is audacity in steel and concrete. At 650,000 barrels per day, it is designed not only to end Nigeria’s dependence on imported fuel but to turn the country into an exporter.
Critics mutter about monopoly, and there is satire in that too. For decades, a cartel of marketers fattened themselves on inefficiency, yet suddenly it is the industrialist who builds something who is accused of dominance.
But beyond the jokes lies something profound. This is not merely a refinery. It is a shift in narrative, a demonstration that dysfunction is not Nigeria’s fate, that a vision sustained across scepticism can, in fact, bend reality. As Chinua Achebe once wrote, “When the moon is shining, the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.” Nigeria, long crippled by inefficiency, is beginning to stir.
Back to Johnson’s maze. The marketers, like Hem, are still staring at the empty cheese station, muttering about how unfair life is. They hope the old days of subsidy and forex windfalls will return. They fear the unknown more than they fear irrelevance.
They now look like Nokia executives in 2007, laughing at the iPhone while holding on to buttons no one wanted. NITEL, Nigeria’s once-mighty telecoms company, fell the same way, clinging to yesterday while tomorrow walked past its rusty gates. Billionaire businessman Femi Otedola, who led the formation of the Depot and Petroleum Products Marketers Association of Nigeria (DAPPMAN), has warned DAPPMAN and its co-travellers to adapt, innovate, or perish. The marketers surely know that NITEL is now reduced to a ghost story parents tell their children about how a phone line used to take two years to install.
But unlike phones, oil is survival. And the marketers, like Johnson’s Hem, sit at the abandoned cheese station, waiting for the dysfunction system that will never return. They issue threats of collapse, hoping fear can buy them time. Yet history is unkind to those who mistake yesterday’s privileges for tomorrow’s guarantees.
Those who adapt may yet discover new cheese in logistics, petrochemicals, renewable energy, or technology-driven distribution. Those who refuse will fade, like outdated actors refusing to leave the stage long after the curtain has fallen.
Now, even their old allies in the industrial labyrinth – PENGASSAN (Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria) and NUPENG (Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) reveal themselves as defenders of a dying patronage system, clutching at yesterday’s privileges as if they were immutable rights. These unions now rail against a refinery that symbolises the very industrial renewal Nigerians have long desired. Their posturing is not advocacy but self-preservation, thinly veiled attempts to protect rents, intimidate reformers and drag the nation back into a cycle of scarcity and import dependency. It is time their rhetoric is properly unveiled as anxiety masquerading as outrage, a reflex to sabotage change rather than shape it. A refusal to accept that the maze has changed.
But the maze has changed. There is no going back. Unlike 2012, Nigerians are wiser and this time, President Bola Tinubu has not flinched. His blunt declaration on inauguration day “Subsidy is gone” was both policy and epitaph.
Wole Soyinka once warned, “The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.” In this context, the tyranny was inefficiency, and silence was complicity. Dangote’s refinery has broken that silence with the roar of machines.
The Dangote Refinery is more than a factory. It is a metaphor, a mirror, and perhaps even a moral. It shows that the walls of Nigeria’s maze are not unshakeable. That change, though often resisted, is possible. That those who cling to dysfunction risk being left behind, clutching at memories of a cheese that will never return.
The question is simple, will Nigeria’s oil marketers and their enablers learn to move with the cheese, or will they, like Hem, stay behind, grumbling in the dark corridors of a maze that has already shifted?
For the first time in a long while, the choice is not in the hands of government, subsidy boards, or forex dealers. It lies in the ability of an industry to adapt, or to die.
And that, perhaps, is the greatest irony of all; that in the land where absurdity once reigned supreme, the real joke may now be on the middlemen.
*Abiodun, a communications strategist writes from Lagos
