The increase of petroleum pump price to N151.56 has resulted in uproar. There was wide condemnation of the increase by Nigerians following the announcement by the Pipelines and Product Marketing Company (PPMC), a subsidiary of the Nigerian National Petroleum Commission (NNPC), on Wednesday.

The PPMC’s, D.O Abalaka announced the increment through a statement which reads: “Please be informed that a new product price adjustment has been effected on our payment platform.

“To this end, the price of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) is now one hundred and fifty one naira, fifty-six kobo (N151.56k) per liter. This takes effect from September 2, 2020.”

Upon the news, Nigerians took to social media to register their displeasure over the development.

“Misroad & mishap of a government we have, not minding the rippling effect on the citizenry, we can’t call this insensitivity again, this is just pure Evil!” Engr. Segun Akande wrote on Twitter. “How do you expect citizens to live with these erroneous eroding steps, when government is deliberately inflicting excruciating pain on its people? We need God’s intervention, this government is callous.”

“Oh God, have mercy on us, the masses, the government continues to increase prices of essentials; petrol, power, taxes, salary remain static for those that are working, majority are jobless, no income for many, oh God have mercy on us,” Modupe Lawal said.

They were among the many voices that called out the federal government for the fuel price hike. Others shared video clips of the 2012 national protest, instigated by former President Goodluck Jonathan’s attempt to remove the petrol subsidy then. They said that the most glaring message in the video clips is that many of the protesters are in government today.

Though some members of the Nigerian House of Representatives have waded into the matter, ordering PPMC to halt the implementation of the new pump price, the reversal seems unlikely.

In a statement on Wednesday, the Minority Leader of the House Ndudi said the pump price increment is unacceptable as it would result in further hardship for Nigerians.

“The increase is unacceptable as it will result in an increase in the already high cost of consumer goods and services, and worsen the current economic hardship being suffered by Nigerians,” he said, adding that “the minority caucus in the House of Representatives rejects the announced increase in the pump price of fuel.”

Consequently, the Minority Caucus ordered PPMC to immediately rescind its announcement and revert to the former price.

In solidarity with Nigerians, the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), who led the protest back in 2012, rejected the price hike. The president, Comrade Ayuba Wabba said the Federal Government is taking Nigerians for granted by inflicting more hardship on them in the face of a global health crisis.

“It is like Nigerians are being taken for a ride, the increase in price of petroleum is like adding insult to injury. The increase in price of petroleum has happened now more than three times in three months, only yesterday (September 1) they hiked the tariff of electricity. And to compound it they also reduced the interest rate of savings which affects mostly the poor and the vulnerable,” he said.

While the reactions of both the House’s Minority Caucus and the NLC are being applauded by many, it shows that most Nigerians are yet to understand the implication of fuel subsidy removal.

In March, the NNPC GMD, Mele Kyari announced that fuel subsidy has been totally removed and there is no going back to it.

“There is no fuel subsidy anymore in Nigeria. It is zero subsidy forever,” he said. “There would be no resort to either fuel subsidy or under-recovery of any nature. NNPC will play in the petroleum marketplace, just like another marketer in the space.”

The removal of the fuel subsidy means that the Federal Government will no longer pay for Nigerians to buy PMS at a cheaper rate, they will now have to buy according to global oil prices. It’s a reality many failed to grasp immediately due to the downturn in the oil market.

Back in March, there was a massive decline in oil prices due to COVID-19 pandemic, so that the government had to reduce fuel price from N143 to N125, and subsequently reduced it to N123.50 in April. Therefore, the impact of the subsidy removal wasn’t immediately felt. However, as economies began to open, oil demands increased accordingly, forcing Nigerian petroleum marketers to increase the pump price.

Today, the Brent Crude is $44.56, which is a significant growth from the past decline and a big trouble for Nigerians. Alas, many are oblivious of the bitter reality of rising crude prices, which means that they will continue to buy fuel at higher cost as long Nigerian refineries are not working and the government is not paying to subsidize the cost.

Anytime somebody complains about unfavourable situations in his life, or feels weighed down by circumstances around him, he is told to look around so he could see people that are worse off. People believe that the only way, or rather, the best way to show gratitude or to become content is by seeing those they are better than. But if you really look at this philosophy, you will come to agree that it does not help as people think. I will explain this later.

Another ideology and behaviour that we should avoid is comparing ourselves with more successful people. Sometimes, we feel that placing ourselves side by side with persons that are more successful than us will spur us on. Well, this is possible. In fact, it helps. But then, if it is not well thought out and handled, it will cause more problems.

The first negative effect of comparing ourselves with people is that we lose focus. A good example of this can be seen when athletes run 100 meters dash. In this type of race, every athlete has his own lane, which must be maintained till the end of the game. In order to maintain this lane, athletes have to focus only on the finishing line. Should any of them look beside him or withdraw his eyes from the finishing line to look at those before or behind him, he is bound to run into another person’s lane. Apart from facing disqualification, an athlete that jumps out of his lane is likely going to crash into a fellow runner. This is the same thing with every aspect of life. Focusing on people instead of the goal can distract us. Of course we need people to motivate us with their life’s stories and achievements, but that should not be our main spur. Likewise, we don’t have to focus on those behind us to be grateful for what we have and how far we have gone because it will draw us back or make us fall. You will see the best way to do this if you stay with me.

If we keep our gaze on people that we are better than, we will think that we have “arrived”. We will believe that we are ok with what we have achieved because we will think that we have achieved so much. We will not be bothered with finding ways to improve on ourselves. We will actually become that proverbial one-eyed man that is the king in the land of the blind. But guess what, when we find ourselves outside our comfort zones, we will get lost.

If a person focuses his attention on people he believes are more successful than him, he is going to experience a lot of negative emotions. Bet me, such a person will encounter despair, frustration, anger, anxiety, hatred, jealousy, envy, you name it. Some may find themselves in an unhealthy competition with the object of their attention. Others may believe they don’t need to worry themselves any longer because they can never measure up. There may be the risk of developing inferiority complex or desiring to terminate our “oppressor”. By the end of the day, it will pay nothing good to compare ourselves with others.

The big question now is who should we compare ourselves with?

A lot of people may ask you, “Must you compare yourself with someone?” Well, naturally, you will want to measure your progress, and the only way to do it is by comparison. If you don’t compare, you won’t know the differences. You may continue to make the same mistakes or remain stagnant if you don’t measure your progress. But then, you don’t need to look outside when measuring your progress and achievements. Just look within you and the answer will stare you back in the face.

The best person to compare yourself with is you. Like the athletes, we all have our own lanes and finishing lines. That someone is better or worse than us should not be our concern, sort of. Yes, we need successful people that can pull us up, but we don’t have to measure our progress using their yardsticks because they have theirs while we have ours. All we need to do to see how far we have gone is to compare our present selves with who we were in the past. We just have to look into our lives to see how we have been moving up or going down. If we see that we have made progress from who we were in the past, then we should express our gratitude to God and to those that helped us through. However, if we have been stagnant or moving backwards, we should then trace the reason for this and work on it. There is no way comparing ourselves with other people can bring on this milestone.

Note that I am not saying that we should ignore the successful and the yet-to-be successful people around us. Neither am I saying that we shouldn’t allow their success to motivate us. I am only saying that we should not use them as yardsticks to measure our progress.

Tesla’s Elon Musk has climbed past Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in the billionaires chat table. The tech prodigy saw his asset value leaped to $115 billion after Tesla’s 5-1 stock split on Monday that yielded 12% surge.

Monday’s activities saw Musk secured a top three position in the league table of billionaires. He is now only poorer than Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man with $205 billion net worth and Bill Gates, the second richest in the world with $126 billion net worth.

The year 2020 has seen Elon Musk viciously climbed the billionaires’ ladder amid the success of his business adventures, including SpaceX’s space trip.

However, his earnings have come from mainly Tesla, whose stock has risen to 1000% this year, putting the company’s worth around $475 billion.

The Making of a Centibillionaire

In 2018, Musk got Tesla’s shareholders to approve a pay package that does not involve salaries or cash bonuses. The deal means that Musk will be paid through 20.3 million stock options over the course of 10 years, in 12 equal blocks of 1.7 million options. His stock payment happens whenever Tesla achieves its operational and market value goals.

Musk qualified for the first block of stock payment on May 28, when Tesla hit a $100 billion market cap, and was paid a whopping $1.8 billion on July 10. He has received multi-billion dollars payment in stock options since May and will likely receive more before the end of the year.

Musk was worth about $32 billion in January this year, but has witnessed his net worth skyrocket by about $90 billion to get him a prominent place among centibillionaires. Musk owns about 20% of Tesla’s shares, making him the highest shareholder of the company, and putting him in a position to climb higher before the year runs out.

In addition to Tesla, Musk has been working on his space projects that consist of satellite internet and commercial trips to Mars. The Starlink satellite internet, a project geared toward providing high speed broadband internet for locations where internet access has been poor, unreliable, expensive, or not available has scaled the hurdles to success. Over 700,000 people are said to be already demanding the internet service in the US alone.

The Starlink project aims to provide satellite internet service in the Northern United States and Canada by the end of 2020, and reach as many locations as possible globally in 2021.

On his Space trips project, Musk said SpaceX is planning to start the assembly of a prototype of the Super Heavy rocket booster that will take its starship into orbit. Starship is SpaceX’s platform for the moon, mars and beyond travels, and Musk, while acknowledging the challenge, said he is working with SpaceX to see that commercial space trips become a reality in 2021.

“This is uncharted territory. Nobody’s ever made a fully reusable orbital rocket… and then having something twice the size of a Saturn V (the rocket that astronauts travel with to the moon) that’s also fully reusable… that’s really something else, that’s profound. That’s the gateway to the galaxy or at least the solar system,” he said.

SpaceX has been working on the development of Starship at its Texas site, Boca Chica. The company has raised $1.9 billion in new funding due to emerging interest in SpaceX rockets, which has surged since the successful trip of the Dragon Crew to space, and the company now has oversubscription of nearly $2 billion.

According to Forbes, the global space economy is expected to be worth at least $1.1 trillion in 2040. SpaceX’s Starship will have the capacity to accommodate 100 passengers per trip at the cost of about $50 million per seat.

Apart from SpaceX and Tesla, Musk also runs other companies called Hyperloop and OpenAI. With this great future full of business adventures, he will likely usurp Bill Gates to the second position soon.

Musk will be due to receive the third block of his stock options in the near future, CNN said if Tesla maintains a market value more than $200 billion over the course of six months, and in four consecutive quarters smash its operational and market value goals, with either revenue above $30 billion or $3 billion in earnings, before interest and taxes, Musk will amass massive wealth.