Clueless ministries give Big Oil excuse to fuel its greed

It would be exasperating but not unexpected for the current flip-flop and blame game on petroleum testing fees to be an extension of ODM-PNU/PDM turf wars. The controversy straddles ODM Chairman Henry Kosgey’s Industrialisation ministry and the Energy ministry under Kiraitu Murungi, who is at the opposite end of the political scale.

The saving grace is that the inspection deal between Kenya Bureau of Standards and Indian firm Geo Chem is now on hold.

But PointBlank notes that despite valid opposition to the fee — including the fact that the private company, not the Government, would benefit more — Big Oil once again proved its profit motive was the be-all and end-all. Pump prices were raised by unjustified margins to ostensibly pass on costs to the consumer.

Although PointBlank is lukewarm about the effectiveness of price controls, such deceitful actions only embolden our support for a proposal by the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) in 2008 to regulate prices of petroleum products. We think ERC should remove these plans from the shelf, back to the table.