When I was a child, my father spoke his mind about my out of line actions oftentimes with a whip. The lashes were painful all right, and did drive home his message very well.

However, more painful was the sight of the whip lying by his side as he killed time on his rocking chair, alone and quiet. You knew you were going to get it, only you did not know when. Moreover, the old man would be deliberate, and even send you to roast him a cob of maize, or ask you to retrieve his cigarette from under the rocking chair where it had mysteriously fallen. Just when you are fully submitted to obedience and counting on mercy, he would grab you by the wrist, and the lashing would then begin - each one with a strong admonition, striped home through your bum skin in defined monotone that rings in your ear to this day. Government's inevitable deregulation of the downstream sector of the oil market, clearly a raging tsunami, just lies there like my father's painful koboko. Its usage is inevitable, the nation is going to be lashed by it, just only when, is not known.

Nothing has made the on coming deregulation of Nigeria's oil sector such a controversial issue than the clear lack of approach that the government has shown. This is bad. Dealers are not waiting. The pump price of petrol says it all. Every fuel dealer is charging at will. They are still lifting at the subsidized rates and selling at any price they wish, sighting deregulation as the reason for the price hike. This impasse will serve to create overnight novo rich, within the NNPC, independent marketers, hoarders and smugglers, drawing their largesse from the hiccup of government's bad management of the decision to deregulate.

They can tell by the tacit monotone of Government officials, Ministers Mansur Mukhtar (Finance) Rilwanu Lukman (Petroleum Resources), Mr Odein Ajumogobia (State, Petroleum), and Prince Adetokumbo Kayode (Labour), subsidy put at some N2 trillion is not tenable any longer. Government is faced with a no win situation. While it cannot sustain the subsidy on one hand, deregulation may not achieve the desired results on the other hand, regrettably, and the organized labour has emphasized this contention. Quite truly, the common person has not benefited from the subsidy under the prevailing circumstances. This is not the way to go about it and one wonders why government has decided to approach the issue in this way.

Pursuing and institutionalizing effective strategies for the impending deregulation poses challenges of building and mobilizing stakeholders at the various levels of community. The understanding of the different arms of labour is important. Stakeholder support and cooperation is dependent largely on information and public sensitization on the vital factors behind government policy, vis-à-vis the public interest. This will determine how the system can cope with the definite backlash of deregulation. In this regard, government approach has left much to be desired and created the impression that it is they against us.

Government is steamrolling the bitter pill of deregulation by arguing that market forces would take control and in supply and demand economics, the prices would lower and even out. While subsidy has made Nigerian petroleum products cheaper, neighbours are inadvertently fleecing the country. Smuggling of petroleum products adversely affects local prices and is indeed responsible for incessant shortages.

However, all these contentions are fallacious. The failure of our domestic capacity to refine petroleum products to meet our needs is the main culprit in our present woeful predicament. When our refineries collapsed due to neglect, we resorted to what should have been a temporary stopgap - the importation of refined products. This regrettably became standard and typically, a powerful cartel of scammers and their beneficiaries grew into the behemoth that is persistently subverting all efforts to get the local refineries going again. Deregulation is coming about because of the victory of endemic corruption in the entire oil chain.

What do you expect from a nation in which NNPC that should repair the refineries is the largest importer of refined petroleum products? Profits there from are sufficient to discourage repairs. Our selfish cabal of experts in the system, bereft of any patriotic virtue to make their expertise count for their country and their people, thwart every effort to restart the refineries. The allure of easy oil contract favours all over the place up for grabs has blinded them from service to the nation. It is this situation that has made the endowment of oil rather a curse than a blessing - our inability to locally refine our crude for all our needs and export the excess for infrastructure development, goods and services. Yet our emerging neigbouring oil producing nations Ghana, Cameroon and Angola easily achieves this.

The argument of smuggling is even a sadder curse - for government is admitting that the customs, police, army and the navy have failed in their duty to curb smuggling. It is an admission of defeat, in the hands of hoarders, smugglers and the cartel of stakes that have frustrated every resolve of government to do the obvious. If these institutions loose to unarmed smugglers and their touts, and the police loose to hoarders, and black marketers, what war can we win as a nation?

Internally, there is a colossal capacity to hoard petrol in iron surface tanks and cheap plastic jerry cans. It is said that it does not matter the quantity you import, bootleggers, black marketers, and smugglers have a crude capacity to store and hoard. In broad daylight, black market fuel sells even to the law enforcement agencies directly opposite the charade called mega stations. Were the security agents to commit themselves truthfully, would black marketers not disappear?

General Abacha, for all the bad things written and said about him, deregulated and raised oil prices, but he wisely set up the Petroleum Trust Fund to channel the savings into infrastructure intervention. General Buhari in his unprecedented management of development intervention had proposed a plan to fix the refineries in 6 months, only insisting that the PTF would handle the refurbishing, and overhauling of the refineries before turning them over to NNPC. A cabal of stakes who used access to Abacha to misdirect the General's interest scuttled the plan, allegedly in concert with the multinationals that built the refineries at grossly inflated contract sums.

As it stands now, government appears hands in the air. Deregulation is inevitable. Nigerians ought to brace for it and adjust as it comes. However, President Yar'adua would do well to heed a few notes of caution coming from organized labour, even though weak and belated. General Abacha had engaged labour in the same manner as the government is doing now, and gave listening ear to their petitions and establishing the Petroleum Trust Fund, which President Obasanjo selfishly killed. The petitions raised then are all relevant even now. It pays to study the big picture of deregulation and effectively respond to the full impact. Lessons should be learnt from the fall out of past attempts. With the price of kerosene and cooking gas already through the roof, our people have turned to forests for firewood - in the face of an invading desert and deteriorating environment!

Deregulating and depending on importation of refined products with earnings from the sale of crude oil is therefore unthinkable as far worse scenarios wait to play out.