Former Minister of Petroleum, Prof. Tam David-West, speaks about his misgivings against the running of the petroleum ministry, corruption and sundry other national issues in this interview with Punch's AKINWALE ABOLUWADE. Except:

"What is wrong with Jonathan is that he takes hook, line and sinker whatever he is told. He is a PhD holder, who should be grounded in the methodology of investigation. [But] he listens to Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as if she is a repository of wisdom."

Some people wonder why you are not satisfied with the performances of your successors in the petroleum ministry.
If I take a job, I will give it my all. Why I am complaining is that I know where they are failing. They sometimes have not been able to resist personal interests. If you are doing that type of job and you have a tinge of personal interest, you have failed. One contract of oil can make you a multi-millionaire in dollars. Many people have not been able to resist this. Now, they are talking about local content. It is good for Nigerians but they should not glamorise it. When I was minister, I told the oil companies that they could not remove a white person, whose tenure has expired, from a position and replace him with another white man. You must check with me if there is no Nigerian that is suitable to fill the vacant position. It is a good policy and Buhari approved it but it was later cancelled by another administration.

You have always insisted that the Federal Government’s subsidy is a fluke. What prove have you?
I challenged President Goodluck Jonathan and all his ministers to a public debate on oil subsidy, but they refused to take the challenge. I have the facts that there is no subsidy, Buhari and the late Chief Gani Fawehinmi said there was no subsidy. Fawehinmi wrote a pamphlet on it. Oil subsidy is all a fraud. At a Gani Fawehinmi lecture, I said the amount the Federal Government would get from oil subsidy was like an amoeba that is always changing shape. The government gave 10 different figures that we could get, so we know it doesn’t exist. They will bring fuel from Port Harcourt to Lagos and say it is imported. It is fraud and the navy has proved it. If any government delights in making life difficult for the people, God will punish them. In every society, the poor are more in number than the rich. Let the government’s policy be directed towards alleviating the suffering of the masses. If you develop a policy against the masses, you are going against God. They had a conference in Lagos on subsidy. They did not invite me; they avoided me because they would be exposed.

Petrol should not sell for more than N40 per litre. After my calculation, a professor of petroleum (a Nigerian based in Texas) sent an article to the media, saying petroleum should not cost more than N35 per litre. They are lying.

Do you agree with the objectives of the Subsidy Reinvestment programme of the FG?
SUREP is a fraud. How can you invest what you don’t have? You are going to put money into that project from other sources. They have not invested well. They just used the SURE Project as a palliative for Nigerians. They are getting money for the SURE project by punishing the people. It is all propaganda. They said they were going to have millions of work, but they have nothing because the premise is wrong and faulty. I said there is no subsidy on technical grounds. It is callous – what do you have the international price for?
You don’t need any international price because the oil was given to us by God. We have refineries and why don’t you drill the oil? Get the product you want to consume into the refineries, refine and sell at the filling stations. So, forget about the international price. But they increased the price and punished the people. They sabotage the refineries by making them moribund. As I am talking to you, no Nigerian refinery is working up to 30 per cent capacity. By this, they create an artificial problem and start to import fuel. We are drilling and there are four refineries but all of them are having problems. The vital parts of the refineries are destroyed.

Don’t you think it is the system that is supporting the illegality?
We can link the problem to poor value system. You cannot do that during the Buhari administration. But what is happening now is that when the leadership cannot address the issue, people will take chances because they know they can get away with it. A former petroleum minister has a filling station and he attends oil marketers’ meeting. He is no longer a minister but a marketer.

Should the President have the sole power to approve licence for oil blocks?
One of the things that I have against Diezani is that the petroleum minister in Nigeria has a lot of power even before my time. The Petroleum Industry Bill gives the minister more powers that he can award and revoke any contract without recourse to anybody. It is crazy to put all the livewire of a country in the hands of one person. The minister should not have all that power. At the National Assembly, Diezani’s argument defeated her. She mentioned Malaysia and Norway as countries where the oil ministers have so much power. A minister that uses Malaysia and Norway to justify a policy in the oil sector is an ignorant minister. Why don’t you use Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Venezuela, who are big players in the oil industry? What is the role of Malaysia in the global oil market? She didn’t use the appropriate examples.