I have followed the recent news report that the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Rt. Hon Yakubu Dogara, has expressed sadness over the death of several Nigerians in a gas explosion in Nnewi, Anambra State. The report added that while calling for a thorough investigation into the incident which occurred on Christmas Eve, leaving several others injured, the Speaker said (that) this was one incident too many that have claimed lives of innocent Nigerians.
He, therefore, called for a thorough investigation to ascertain the root and immediate cause of the explosion in order to avert a reoccurrence.
Here we go again! No, not another probe! We have had one probe too many with nothing to show for it. Heads have to roll this time around. That is the only way the functionaries appointed by our government to serve in our regulatory agencies will come to accept the very obvious fact that they owe us a duty of care.
We have been living apparently unperturbed with crass fiscal irresponsibility with just about everyone waiting for his/her chance or turn to dip into the trough. But here we are talking about our very lives being at stake as has been illustrated by the tragic explosion and inferno at a gas plant at Nnewi. In cases like this criminal neglect cum liability are reasonable findings.
The head, by whatever name called, of the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) will have to be summarily fired if perchance he has not already resigned. The same applies to the regional executives responsible for the deliberately sloppy approval processes for the site location, detailed engineering, procurement and construction, testing and proofing of a typical gas filling plant.
The public cannot know this, but the correct demands of engineering specifications here are way way above that of your usual petrol filling station. Yet the misfits at DPR will grant approvals and gloss over shortcomings as though it does not matter. No, I am not accusing these colleagues of mine of ignorance. They know what to do. With the volume of API codes available and Computer Aided Design (CAD) to checkmate our errors of omission and/or oversight, it is almost impossible to come up with a bad design. All such shortcomings have to be deliberate. We routinely pay for them like in this case of Nnewi with our blood.
With such extreme Hazardous Area Classifications one would then wonder why the typical petroleum refinery or our own NLNG plant does not burn down every other week. Simple. Correct design and operating procedures. Correct design actually anticipates the usual human foibles and incorporates multiple redundancies and interlocks. For goodness sake this is 2015, not 1935 Galveston, Texas.
The investor/businessman is not expected to either understand or appreciate these fine details. That is what DPR is set up to achieve with or without the collaboration of the plant owners. The available sanctions are powerful enough. Close down the plant until it is shown to be safe.
DPR should be impervious to political noises and pressure. If you are clean but pressurized by the political structure, then you resign in as loud a manner as possible. No pension should be worth even one life. This is a matter of ethics. But then the issue hardly ever comes to that. Most of the time, as I have already alleged, the DPR officials are fully complicit. Otherwise a good many of the tank farms dotting the waterways of Lagos and other southern states would not have been granted approval, not even by the folks in Central African Republic. Yes, we are that bad.
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