We are not entirely surprised that the Federal Government backtracked on its earlier plan to remove subsidy on petroleum products by June. It was perhaps predictable. Nonetheless, what must be jarring to most Nigerians at this time is how our officials have taken to worn platitudes to mitigate the shame.
To be sure, Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmad, must have surprised many, when, at the end of the meeting of top officials of the Federal Government last Monday, she admitted that the timing of the planned removal of fuel subsidy was ‘problematic,’ and that the measure will impose more difficulties on the citizens. We are referring to a meeting that had in attendance the Minister of State for Petroleum, Timipre Sylva; Group Managing Director, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Mele Kyari, and the leadership of the two branches of the National Assembly, during which the officials conceded that the government had not put ‘certain things in place’ for the subsidy to be removed.
The government team listed the measures needed to be in place to include finding an alternative to PMS, an enhanced local refining capacity programme, including the 650,000 bpd Dangote Refinery and rehabilitation of the four national refineries that have a combined capacity of 450,000bpd” among the measures it now realises as being necessary.
Backtracking of course meant kicking the problem down the road. Indeed, at the end of the Wednesday Federal Executive Council meeting, the government reminded Nigerians of the humongous cost of the road not taken –the NNPC, had sequel to the suspension of the policy, requested a total of N3 trillion from the Federal Government to fund fuel subsidy in 2022. Secondly, the newly passed Petroleum Industry Act will, for the time being, be held as inchoate – while awaiting amendment to bring it in alignment with the latest reality.
Many questions naturally arise. Did the Federal Government come to the awareness of these issues only after the organised labour led by the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and the Trade Union Congress, (TUC) mounted a vociferous opposition to the measure which, were it to have passed, would have plunged more Nigerians into misery? Did the recognition come before or after Budget 2022 had kicked in, which perforce, had rendered the removal a fait accompli? Couldn’t these developments have been foreseen?
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Ordinarily, the fear of the potential backlash that the measure would have attracted, and which the government might have found extremely difficult to control, ought to have counted for something before the government arrived at the decision. Already, we have seen familiar indices – unmistakeable pointers – to the difficulties that the measure would attract particularly, the negative forces that would be unleashed on an economy already in the throes of an unprecedented inflation and sluggish growth and the potential instability that could have been triggered therefrom. Had the government factored these into its decision-making processes, it would most likely have saved itself the ensuing embarrassment.
As for the subsidy itself, at issue are the old but the lingering concerns which the government has done little to douse – and on which Nigerians would be hard put to yield their ground. By this, we refer to the manifest failure of political will to address matters which they had long accepted as being inextricably linked to the subsidy conundrum: the bogey of fuel importation and the attenuating corruption that it has spawned. It explains why the NNPC has been unable to put a figure on how much fuel the country consumes amidst the perennial whining over fuel smuggling. To this is the million dollar question of why the Buhari administration has, in the whole of the six years of being in the saddle, been unable to fix the nation’s four refineries.
For most Nigerians, theirs would seem not so much about lack of awareness of the costs of the subsidy to the national economy. For, far beyond the scare-mongering statistics about the hemorrhaging going on in the name of subsidy is, for the generality of the citizenry, the age-long puzzle remains why a major oil producing country which once boasted of four refineries is at the mercy of a cabal of fuel importers.
what we must accept is that there is no heroic streak in the decision. Rather it is a surrender to a creative failure and an acceptance that a huge sum of 3 trillion still eats away malignantly at our national innards. it is a quiet storm in side, and covering up with a policy summersault only exposes an unthinking leadership. The issues to tackle stare us like a peevish ghost.
It is understandably at the heart of why a dodgy manoeuvre in the circumstances that those substantive matters are left hanging and unaddressed could not have impressed most Nigerians who have become more discerning. That the government would even dare the policy now is either a measure of how deeply contemptuous it treats the concerns of the citizens on the subject or, a mirror of the degree to which it is out of touch with the feelings of the people. Either position obviously does the image of the Buhari administration no good; if anything, what it does is cast it in the mould of those previous do-nothing administrations before it.
Now that the government has admitted that the conditions for removing the subsidy do not yet exist; and that it needed to be relieved of the ‘unbearable’ N3 trillion subsidy burden – a matter which most Nigerians, contrary to what the government appears to believe, do not necessarily consider disagreeable; only by creating those wholesome conditions which it has mercifully identified – and urgently too – could government claim to have decisively put the ghost of subsidy to rest.