Between 1948 and 1960, the Malayan Communists were all out to weaken Malaysia’s colonial economy. There were recorded acts of sabotage against trains, rubber trees, water pipes, and electric lines with intention to cause serious backlash among the Malaysian population, who gradually withdrew their supports for the Communist movement as their livelihoods became threatened. The numerous acts of sabotage against the British Colonial authorities included targeting railway bridges and hitting of targets such as military camps and were so successful. Also during the Second World War, the Allied Force was reported to have committed sabotage against Peugeot truck factory. After repeated failures to hit the factory, a team of French Resistance fighters and Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents distracted the German guards with a game of soccer while a part of the team entered the plant and destroyed the production machines. Likewise, subtle acts of sabotage included loss of German shipments and allowing poor quality material to pass factory inspections, on one hand, many active sabotage attempts were carried out against critical rail lines to disrupt transportation. Germany recorded about 1,429 instances of sabotage between January 1942 and February 1943 (wikipeadia).

In the light of the above, is Nigeria under the bombardment of multidimensional economic and political sabotage and should Nigerians believe that their country has truly been left leaderless and rudderless for long? In attempting these posers which have been begging for answers, for decades, one should be quick to establish that no economy, even if advance, is insulated against sabotage; but it is in responses by the countries’ leadership that capacity to govern is made known to all stakeholders. In the piece titled, ‘Who Sabotaged the American Economy’, written by Paul W. Gleason, he was of an opinion that USA was sabotaged during the covid period. He wrote: “the shortage of medical supplies in the United States is a notorious fact. The nation has between 160,000 and 200,000 ventilators; it may need a million. Masks, gowns, face shields, gloves, bottles of hand sanitizer, and tests for the virus are all in short supply. The shortage has come as a great surprise, because the government has been contracting with private firms to make these supplies for years, and private firms, as everybody knows, will provide more of any product at a lower price than any central planner ever could. Responding to market signals like greyhounds leaping out of the gates, they race after efficiencies, pushing down costs and boosting productivity. Yet every day brings fresh evidence of market-based inefficiency. To pick only one example, The New York Times reported on March 29 that a medical supplies company in Costa Mesa, California, which had won a competitive multimillion-dollar contract to make ventilators in 2008, had yet to deliver a single unit. How could a private firm fail so spectacularly to meet the public demand?”

In 2022, there was a report titled, ‘Idle refineries workers earn N136b amid $3b upgrade cost’ and published by the Guardian Newspaper that “despite being shut down, there are indications that the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC) may have left over N136 billion as operational deficits across its three refineries in Kaduna, Port Harcourt and Warri. This is as concerns over delivery timeline and violations of local content law dog ongoing rehabilitation of the refineries. Recall that NNPC had shut down the 445,000-capacity refineries for over two years, yet kept the over 1,701 staff at the facilities, as it rehabilitates the Port Harcourt refinery for $1.5 billion and those of Warri and Kaduna for $1.4 billion… On average, NNPC spends, plus or minus, N68 billion in paying salaries and other expenses at the moribund refineries, yearly. In the last two years, the losses have amounted to an average of N136 billion”. Now if one may ask, is it an act of operational efficiency that Nigeria could not refine crude locally for decades or it is an act of deliberate economic sabotage to please and satisfy some interests at the detriment of Nigerians’ wellbeing? ‘Is fuel available at pump stations or not and are you getting to buy or not’, a former NNPC chief once fired back when queried, at a public event, on the rationale behind Nigeria importing 100 per cent  fuel. “We have to do a lot of hopping around here and there to ensure that products are available for Nigerians to use”, the ex-NNPC chief said. This is the situation in an industry that even school children know is the backbone of economic activities in Nigeria. Its inefficiency has impacted the quality of lives and standards of living of over 200 million population negatively; yet the leadership seems untouched and unmoved about the plights of the impoverished millions of people.

Nigerians have been under the heavy yoke of petroleum products importation and fuel subsidy’s under-the-table deals for decades until of recent when Dangote jumped into the energy sector ring to give some ray of hope. However, the refinery that was commissioned May 2023 and promised to start production immediately to alleviate the suffering of Nigerians is yet to release a drop of petrol, a year after. Is there an act of deliberate sabotage at play? But for the voicing out of the President of Dangote Industries that he wouldn’t have ventured into building a refinery had it been clear to him what he would pass through in doing so; and that he was warned against building refinery, many wouldn’t have known the games going on in the sector. His Vice President, oil and gas, had followed the voicing out with a slap-in-the-face accusation that the International Oil Companies (IOCs) operating in Nigeria are actively hindering the refinery’s operations. Quoting him, the IOCs are sabotaging his efforts by “deliberately and willfully frustrating our efforts to buy the local crude through overpricing of crude” ($6 over and above the market price) or outright refusal to sell. This dirty game is happening at a time Nigerians are crying for help and timely intervention; but it is said that NNPC is still issuing out importation licenses, a dangerous body language at a time Nigerians expect the regulators to tackle with fiat the sabotage of the local refining efforts.

It is clear to all that governance is about human beings, and their emotions (successes, failures, jubilations, anguishes, and regrets). What’s needed now, and very importantly, is that government, for once, should show leadership in repositioning the country’s economy by tackling decisively the herdsmen destruction of farms, maiming and killings of farmers, power infrastructure destructions, oil sector and other various sabotaging activities. President Bola Tinubu, at the inauguration of the 31-member Presidential Economic Coordination Council (PECC) at the Aso Rock Villa, Abuja, on Thursday July 4, 2024 said, “as a nation, it is so shameful that we have about 4.5 gigawatts. We must increase our oil production too to 2 million barrels per day within the next few months. Remove all barriers hindering investments into the sector to enhance competitiveness. We’ve had a challenge thrown at us and all of us will have to be careful”. The time for Mr President, and his lieutenants, to show capacity and capability is now because the suffering Nigerians are passing through is becoming extremely unbearable.