by Eyo Emmanuel
Have you been so deep in debt that you begin to wonder if you own debt or debt owns you? That’s going to be Nigeria’s reality with a U.K court charging Nigeria to pay P&ID the sum of 9 billion dollars.
If your head is still spinning from all the zeros that makes 9 billion dollars, it’s understandable, we did too. It’s also scary that the country is at risk of having it’s assets seized if they are unable to pay P&ID the company responsible for taking Nigeria to court. In 2010 P&ID signed a deal with Nigerian ministry officials in which it was agreed that the government would install pipelines and supply gas that would connect P&ID’s processing plants in Calabar to be built free of charge to the state.
The whole aim of all this was to have wet gas converted into dry gas to power Nigeria’s electric grid which would have improved electricity in the country. Before you think P&ID did this out of their church mind, the company stood to gain sales from the by-products of the gas such as propane and ethane and could have gained up to six billion dollars in revenue over twenty years.
The Nigerian government did not keep to it’s own end of the bargain, like we’re surprised, and now their negligence is going to cost them a huge sum of money. Talk about making an expensive mistake.