Urgent! Fuel subsidy removal in Nigeria: A call for responsibility

Kings UBA

1 year ago

The Government of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu truly braved the occasion of his inauguration on May 29, 2023 and announced that fuel subsidy was gone! It was a decisive pronouncement because several past governments have planned to say this but could not. Other governments, particularly that of former President Goodluck Jonathan in 2011 seemed to be more interested in the after-effect of subsidy removal on the poor Nigerians than scoring that political point. A lot of protests sprung up, led partly by the incumbent President, Tinubu. Jonathan was not allowed to go on with the execution of his planned phased removal of the subsidy of fuel. Former president Muhammadu Buhari also had plans about fuel subsidy removal but could not implement it until he left the office. Then came Tinubu who did not want to entertain any excuse for not removing the subsidy that ran into N1 trillion in two months.

Defending his intentions, Tinubu said he had to insert the pronouncement against the advice of his media handlers. They had removed the ‘fuel subsidy is gone’ statement from the President’s speech. But when Tinubu was about mounting the pedestal for his inaugural speech, he re-introduced the statement himself. His conviction was that there was no better opportunity to make the pronouncement than in his inaugural address.

That was the pronouncement that has changed the life of ordinary Nigerians for worse in the last two months. Nigeria is a mono-product economy which is driven by petroleum products. Anything that affects petroleum affects the whole economy. The removal of fuel subsidy which took the retail price of the product from N198 to N617 currently is causing untold hardship to a lot of Nigerians.

Economy watchers believe that the ‘subsidy is gone’ statement should not just a mere statement. But a statement backed with responsibility. More than a two-third population of Nigerians are poor people who depend on daily income for survival. Workers are poorly remunerated. The rate of Unemployment and underemployment is often rated so high at about 70 percent. That was before the removal of subsidy. Bearing these circumstances in mind, one would expect the Government to have been able to roll-out subsidy palliative measures within one month of its removal, to be able to cushion the adverse effect on the population. It’s two months already after this pronouncement yet the citizens are not getting any better for it.

The government has introduced more economic policies that heighten the pressure rather than ameliorate it. One is foreign exchange policy which has now taken the exchange rate is about N800 per a $USD. With this, a lot of Nigerians cannot afford to pay school fees in $USD. There are also increases in school fees and other basic issues of the ordinary Nigerians.

Nigerians are now more than two months into this harsh economic reality. And they are getting to a tipping point if the government fails to revise some of these policies or introduce a robust palliative to cushion the effects on Nigerians.

The proposed N80,000 monthly for 12 million households is an absurd proposal. It should not have been announced that anybody. It was in bad taste and does not seem to have been put together having the interest of Nigerians at heart.

The government of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu should urgently think out solution to these problems to ease these burdens on the ordinary people. If this fails, in the coming months, the situation will become unbearable to the majority of Nigeria and that may start a revolution the government wound not be able to contain.