| Nigeria: An Object Lesson In African Financial Management |  |  |  |
| Written by John of Gwent |
| January 2012 |
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But my eye fell upon a story that I feel outlines just where this country is headed should those running it, and those who ran it for the thirteen years before that, continue to have their way. It seems that there is uproar in Nigeria this morning as fuel prices have doubled overnight owing to the withdrawal of the state subsidy on petrol. Yesterday a litre of petrol cost roughly what it cost us the day I passed my driving test, twenty six pence a litre. Today it costs what it cost us after three years of John Major's Fuel Duty Escalator, sixty pence a litre. The reason is that the Nigerian government has withdrawn a state subsidy on the pump price of petrol it imports. The key word there, the word that explains everything that anyone needs to know about that sorry shithole of a Black African State is not as some people might think "subsidy". It is the word import. For the truth is that this shining beacon for the achievement of the Black Man in his own continent is a country that produces and exports more crude oil than any other African country, yet it is so riven with corruption and anarchy that it cannot get its act together to construct its own petrol refinery and must instead import petrol for its people. Having said that, I see that Newport Council have recently been handed a planning application for a licence to drill for oil and gas in the fields just south of Nash College. What a splendid opportunity for the positive discrimination multiculturalists to bring us the advantages of energy policy as advocated by the indigenous population of the Dark Continent.        |
Prompted by the previous article, I just spent five minutes browsing the BBC news web site to see whether they were circling like vultures waiting for someone else to kill their next meal for them, or whether they had, as I suspected, long since taken their fill of Emma West's story and moved on. As some will already know, last year brought me a once-in-a lifetime opportunity to study the behaviour of the Electronic News Gathering vulture and it was no surprise to me to see thay have found new pickings.