The Partner for National Economic Progress (PANEP), a civil society organisation (CSO) in Nigeria, has demanded an end to sabotage and other clandestine attacks on individual investments in the country’s oil and gas sector.
The CSO, with a mandate to entrench economic prosperity and elevate Nigerians‘ welfare, highlighted the importance of the petroleum sector to Nigeria‘s economy.
However, they wondered why a few elements and organisations were bent on hijacking it for personal gains.
Addressing a crowd of supporters and members at the Unity Fountain, Abuja, after staging a rally with the theme “National Unity Against Sabotage: Reclaiming Our Petroleum Sector for the People”, Comrade Olayinka Dada, who spoke on behalf of the coalition, declared that, „The Nigerian petroleum sector remains a critical component of the national economy. However, it continues to face persistent threats from internal and external saboteurs whose activities hitherto included product diversion, smuggling, pipeline vandalism, hoarding, round tripping, dumping, collusion to inflate prices and worst of all, organised economic subversion targeted at frustrating efforts at making Nigeria an oil refining country.”
Yesterday, the rally started at the Unity Fountain and ended at the National Assembly complex in the nation’s capital.
He said that with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu removing the criminal fuel subsidy regime and launching the world-class Dangote Refineries and Petrochemicals Limited, the saboteurs have mutated into launching defamation campaigns against Dangote Refineries and conniving with questionable unions and agencies to discredit the refinery and continue the importation of very low-quality petroleum products.
Dada lamented that these actions directly sabotage the government’s reforms, distort market stability, discourage real investments in the downstream petroleum sector, cause scarcity and bring untold hardship to Nigerians.
According to him, despite several policy interventions and regulatory reforms, including the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) and subsidy reforms, the sabotage of downstream operations continues to undermine progress, encourage fuel corruption, and erode public trust in the system.
Dada said the situation calls for urgent and coordinated civic action to support the federal government’s efforts in sanitising the sector and holding saboteurs accountable.
“This is exactly what PANEP has risen to, especially in furthering the liberation spirit of the Nigerian 65th Independence Day celebrations. Our mission is rooted in an unshakeable collective resolve that sabotage must stop, now and forever,“ he stated.
The coalition lamented the sad situation following the collapse of Nigeria‘s refineries, describing the decades-long importation regime as one of the most criminal and economically debilitating ventures in Nigeria‘s history.
“Alhaji Aliko Dangote has come to save us from an oil cartel that fed on our collective failure to refine petroleum products locally. This set of persons used blackmail and unions to frustrate the government’s efforts to maintain the subsidy regime.
“With Dangote Refinery and Petrochemicals Limited, every crude arm-twisting strategy has been employed by this unpatriotic and wicked cartel to frustrate the refinery. The shenanigans of trade unions and the marketers, maybe the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), must be seen as criminal sabotage and not unionism,” the CSOs said.
PANEP accused the oil workers and the unions of sabotaging the resolve of Olusegun Obasanjo‘s administration to sell the moribund public refineries so they can continue diverting billions of dollars of Nigerians’ money in the name of rehabilitation.
Dada recalled that they recently deceived Nigerians into thinking the Port Harcourt Refinery was working, adding, “These are saboteurs, and no sugar coating will change that.“
The coalition urged Nigeria to break free from this mindless cabal and its agents in government agencies and those masquerading as labour unions.
It appealed to the federal government to „intensify efforts to stop further acts of sabotage as Nigerians are happy with the drop in prices of petroleum products.“
