You know how it is when you host a guest and tell them to feel at home, so they enter your kitchen and take a shit in the sink? That’s what this ongoing fuel scarcity is starting to feel like.
It all started when someone slept on their job and allowed the importation of contaminated fuel. It was a terrible lapse in judgement, but nobody is above mistakes, so we’ll let it slide. That being said, why are we still dealing with fuel scarcity more than six weeks later?
We all thought this mess would be sorted in a matter of days, and we’d return to our stress-free Nigerian lives. But after all this time, we’re still queueing for fuel and dealing with the rising prices of petrol and diesel. Hell, some people are even stealing generators in the middle of all this.
We’ve heard all the excuses and midnight apologies from President Buhari, but this fuel scarcity is feeling too at home. It looks like we’ll need to take extraordinary measures as a nation to earn the favour of the god of surplus. We have some suggestions on the things that need to happen to end this crisis.
Buhari gets treatment from a Nigerian doctor in Nigeria
There’s nothing wrong with him that a few misplaced plasters can’t solve.
Buhari has been president for nearly seven years, and he hasn’t taken anything as basic as paracetamol from a Nigerian doctor. This is despite the fact that taxpayers have sunk billions of naira into the State House Clinic for him and his family to feel fresh. In the middle of this fuel scarcity chaos, he still found time to travel to London to chill with his doctors for two weeks.
The very first sacrifice we need to make to end the scarcity is for Buhari to return home so a Nigerian doctor can treat the earache preventing him from hearing the cries of Nigerians. Seriously, what can Dr Higginbottom do that Dr Komolafe can’t?
Tinubu tells us his real age
If there’s one thing we don’t like, it’s controversy over the age of our leaders. We’ve gone through this with Buhari, and now Bola Tinubu wants to be president with too many question marks hanging over his head. Is he 69 as he claims, or is he a World War I veteran like his haters allege? He should confess. There’s no shame in being old. After all, there’s a 102-year-old woman also running for the president’s seat and we think she rocks.
ALSO READ: Why Nigeria (Probably) Needs a 102-Year-Old President
Someone must explain why lawmakers get hardship allowance
What do Nigerian lawmakers do that entitles them to a monthly hardship allowance of over N1 million? Sitting on comfortable seats to shout “Aye” and “Nay”? Or rejecting sensible reforms to our laws? What’s hard about their jobs? If anyone needs hardship allowance, it’s you that’s reading this article while standing in your 157th fuel queue since February 2022.
We need to know how Lai Mohammed sleeps at night
Lights on or off? On his stomach or back?
We’re not going to call Lai Mohammed a liar, but we’ll say that he’s not a huge fan of telling the truth. What we’d like to know is his creative process and how he manages to sleep at night doing the things he does.
Does he sleep with one pillow or two? Is his bedsheet made by Abba Kyari’s tailor? Does he sleep standing up or hanging upside down like an old-timey vampire? We need to know so this fuel scarcity can end immediately.
What does Governor Ayade smoke?
No one is as creative at naming annual budgets as Governor Ben Ayade of Cross River State. From “Budget of Infinite Transposition” to “Budget of Kinetic Crystallization” and “Budget of Quabalistic Densification”, this guy is the Shakespeare of naming ceremonies. Let’s not forget the “Budget of Olimpotic Meristemasis”, “Budget of Blush and Bliss” and “Budget of Conjugated Agglutination”.
Clearly, there’s some illegal unnatural substance involved in his creative process, and he needs to tell us so this fuel scarcity can end. Or he can just introduce us to his English teacher. We’d like to have a couple of words.
Okorocha must explain those statues
At a time when he was owing pensioners as governor of Imo State, Senator Rochas Okorocha spent millions of naira erecting statues of “heroes” like Jacob Zuma of South Africa. He said it was to improve Imo State’s tourism profile, but we really need him to tell the real truth, especially as he wants to be president. What was the reason?
Expose who’s “stealing” our fuel
We found out this week that about 107 million barrels of crude oil lifted for domestic consumption disappeared without a trace in 2019. This amounts to billions of naira ending up in private pockets.
Mr Billionaire, Tony Elumelu, also complained that only less than 3,000 barrels of crude oil make it to one terminal that should be receiving over 200,000 barrels a day. These are not criminals coming like thieves in the night. These ones are knocking on doors and taking out all your furniture because someone in the house sold them without putting the money in the family account.
And if we cannot get to the bottom of this blatant stealing, Buhari should do the reasonable thing and sack the Minister of Petroleum Resources for being terrible at his job. But we don’t imagine Buhari is so eager to sack himself.
ALSO READ: Fuel Scarcity + National Grid Collapses — How are Nigerians Coping?
