Years ago when the hip-hop culture was at its peak in the United States, I loved listening to Warren G's solo album, 'Regulate'. I hardly understood the lyrical cadences of that song save for the fact that that east coast rapper successfully drew my attention to that word, 'regulate'.

Regulate, what did Warren G mean when he drawled on and on and said that we should regulate? Well, the more I saw the regulate video, the more amused I was at the choice of words that the musician chose to address social occurrences like drugs, gang banging, car jacking and the rings of prostitutes that swarmed all over streets and thoroughfares of Harlem and Detroit as soon as the dark crept in.

But my attention was drawn again to another word being bandied about today - 'deregulation'. If the truth be told, most of us have no relationship with that word either in flesh and blood or in spirit, but already it has already begun to drain our blood at fuel stations. Only two days after the NLC embarked on a strike in the Federal Capital Territory, FCT, Nigerians were already running helter-skelter like Chicken Little, insisting that the world would soon collapse on our heads. All of this was because there was going to be a deregulation of the downstream oil sector of the Nigerian economy. And if another truth be told, the common man, from Bama to Badagry, and from Mafoluku to Malumfashi, is there anyone of them that knows what deregulation really means? What is deregulation?

Well, according to the champions of deregulation, it is the silver bullet to our endemic energy problems. The argument is that it has become too cumbersome for government to continue to dole out large sums to support the implements and institutions and personalities that help to meet our daily fuel needs.

Ordinarily, with the kind of sincerity that everyone has seen in the Yar'Adua government, this would have been time to key in to the deregulation mantra. Look at it this way - what sense does it make for government to continue to import fuel when there are refineries on ground? Why not let private people handle the importation so that the product s readily available, no matter what it would cost?

These should have been the questions that could support the need to deregulate. And the answers to these questions should have been an aye and amen, but not so fast my dears. First of all, a country like Nigeria, as everyone knows, has no business with fuel importation. Four refineries dot three key areas of this country - Kaduna, so that we shouldn't rely on just our own light 'sweet' crude; Warri, and Port Harcourt - because the oil is extracted from there and it would not make sense to cite them in Oshogbo, for instance. But the point must be made that these refineries are just a waste of everybody's time. When I visited that place sometime ago, they were just a mass of rotting pipes.

Everyone goes about as though nothing is wrong, and when I asked, somebody told me: You know no say this na Nigeria? Of course that would mean that if the refineries were working, all of this deregulation argument would not even come up at all. Instead of buying refined products, others would buy from us. Consider this too: everyday, this country gets $2.8billion from crude oil exportation. Basic multiplication puts that figure at about $90billion monthly. Now, I would not consider myself very smart but wouldn't it be considered smarter if we put some of those monies aside to build other refineries if the ones on ground are rotting away and private people are not interested in getting involved with new ones? If I remember correctly, when the Olusegun Obasanjo government was begging to be forgiven our debt, the argument was that it would give us an opportunity to use monies that should have been used to offset those debts for things like our refineries, schools, roads and hospitals? Were we just being taken for a ride then?

And this brings us back again to the deregulation question. Is deregulation really the silver bullet to our energy problems? I ask this question at this pertinent moment when the attention of the world is already focused on the Climate Change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark. Serious people are no longer talking about oil and deregulation. The focal point of the world today is in fashioning a template that would help to mitigate the effects of rising temperature from the use of fossil fuels. People are tinkering with bold ideas of how to replace oil with other energy sources like hydro, solar, biomass and the rest.

Therefore in addition to discussions concerning regulation or deregulation, I beg to suggest that we focus on fixing the railways and fix them fast. Fixing the railways for this country translates to less reliance on oil and the number of cars that ply our roads, and less people needing oil for their vehicles. It also means that we would have made a quiet commitment to cut down on carbon emissions and position ourselves to really 'deregulate' from relying on oil.