NIGERIA: Who is Subsidizing What?

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Submitted by Chu Nwanze on Mon, 09/01/2012 - 11:36am

The many controversies surrounding the subsidy on premium motor spirit, and the government's effort to remove it, may be banging themselves in my head, but the truth is, we need to really get a grasp of the major players in this drama and the true story.

Enter the Government: A large armada of men and women corrupt enough and lacking the political will to bring socially-impacting and welfarist policies led by a first Ph.D Nigerian President, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan.

The Otuoke-born former Bayelsa Governor riding to public prominence rather by sheer luck from humble beginnings and owning no shoes of his own to go to school, is backed by former World Bank MD - Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, an economist of repute who, in her first coming, saved us the huge debt burden (which by the way, we have found ourselves courting).

Enter the Oil Marketers: A cabal they call them, but we know these people. They sit in the boardrooms of the big oil companies that import the 'subsidized fuel'. They are the ones who provide magical figures to the government that has seen the subsidy figures grow from 300Billion to 1.2 Trillion, a groaning sum in less than four years. They sure owe us explanations!

Enter the Nigerian Citizens: People like you and I who live under a paltry $1 a day and are now forced to pay about their daily income for a litre of fuel. You ask why must they use fuel? Well because they all have the 'I better pass my neighbour' generators and that is the only means of stable electricity for most of them.

Is this the right time?

Of course, a lot of other players - the NNPC, PEF, and so on, are somewhere in the mix playing various roles and making the subsidy budget grow into the monster it has become.

I am forced to publicly declare my support for the subsidy removal because I understand what it means - but I ask, why dump the baggage on the Nigerian who is still grappling with his daily bread, lack of social infrastructure, insecurity, corrupt public office holders, inflation, and the host of uncertainties and difficulties that rocks his world!

Elementary knowledge of planning tells me that there are terms like short-term, medium and then long-term plans. Government has quoted a good passage in the book of the future and asked us to live it today.

Imagine GSMs in the stone age; would it have been timely? Maybe if all the infrastructure for refining and distributing petroleum products were in place, then to hell with subsidy! But it is non-existent!

Asking Nigerians to pay is unfair and totally unacceptable.

More worrisome is the fact that the government is not looking at the total deregulation regime they want to institute in the downstream sector, but are fixing a light-bulb in the process by removing subsidy and saying they have fixed the problem. I cry foul!

Insensitive

The peculiarities of a 160 Million inhabited black nation must be given due attention.

Our impoverishment would only be deepened by this oil subsidy removal, and then, we breed more destitutes, more corrupt office holders, more angry Nigerians; except this is a population reducing strategy becuase certainly there would be rises even in food prices and people would go hungry for days.

I hear the President slashing 25% of allowances and I nod and look away, because all he is saying is he is creating need for more corruption in the Executive arm.

But maybe he needs to look at it this way, reducing your salary does not automatically provide me with 75 naira extra for a litre of PMS.

It just shows that somewhere and somehow along this road, an insensitive government has arisen and they have failed to answer the burning question: Who is subsidizing what?