Nigeria saves $1bn through crude oil, refine products exchange

Nigeria has so far saved over $1 billion through the application of the Direct Sales, Direct Purchase (DSDP) agreement, the architect of the system, Engr. Salihu Garba Aliyu has said.

The DSDP, a swap agreement first signed in May 2017 by which crude oil is exchanged for equivalent amount of refined petroleum products, has been credited with making petroleum products regularly available apart from saving costs that came with the Oil Processing Agreement (OPA) that it replaced.

Salihu Aliyu, a staff of the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) till he resigned recently and is now the Adamawa Central Senatorial candidate of the Alliance National Party (ANP), said in an interview with journalists in Yola, “With or without politics we’ve been empowering youths. I can give you the ones we took to NNPC on what they could do regarding direct sales and direct purchase system. I was the architect of the system. This was the initiative of President Muhammadu Buhari to give us value for value with exchange of oil for products. With goods worth $100 dollars you get equal value of products, unlike the system that preceded this regime when they would take our crude oil to refine and return to us the worth of products my be 50 percent less and the balance would go to private pockets. 

“When this government came, they said ‘we must block these leaks. We need value for value.’ So we designed the DSDP and we were asked to automate and run the system. In the first eight months of running the system we saved $500 million for government. The savings of the DSDP to date is over $1 billion. I designed the system, and the boys we took from Adamawa State here, I trained them, I showed them what to do to make the system excellent. This is a feat which the foreign firm that the NNPC employed were unable to achieve.”

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He said this is the kind of empowerment that he in his private life had begun to give to youths, especially in ICT and technology and which he intends to improve on if he gets elected senator.

 

He explained, “We have empowerment on ICT, empowerment on software. Software ICT is the in-thing. We are no longer in industrial age. We are in technology era when wealthy people are owners of technology. The Ali Baba’s of this world, owners of face book: these are people who make good money providing technological solutions. We want to train and empower our youths to see the global cake and how they can eat from it.”

He disclosed that he would on Saturday, December 15, start a solar energy system design training for youths, explaining, “We want to teach the trainees how to gather the requirements, assemble and install the system, how to power a borehole, how to light up a farm that has no connection to electricity grid. Or if you are in town and you want 24 hours of electricity, how do you go about it? And so on. That’s the training we are starting with, which involves 20 youths drawn from the local government areas in my constituency and from organisations like the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and Jama’atu Nasril Islam (JNI). Other forms of training for more youths will follow.”