This regime, one year old last month, has no affinity with the truth. They are strange bed fellows. So there will be no point joining the debate on the existence, or lack of it, of petrol subsidy. Evidence abounds that the administration is notorious for speaking from both sides of its mouth and contradicting itself. Lying, which they christened propaganda, is in the DNA of the ruling All Progressives Congress [APC] political party. It lied when it was in opposition to the then ruling Peoples Democratic Party [PDP]. It expanded its capacity to tell lies when it acceded to power nine years ago with the man who turned out to be Nigeria’s affliction, Maj.-Gen Muhammadu Buhari, as president.
While in opposition, APC honchos lied that the former president, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, had trained snipers in Libya to eliminate opposition leaders ahead of the 2015 election. Some of the then opposition leaders including Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi and Nasir el-Rufai went to the extent of identifying their serial numbers in Jonathan’s snipers’ hit list. Even former president, Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, who was in the lead-up to the 2015 election implacably opposed to the administration of Jonathan, helped to give oxygen to the existence of snipers and their hit list. The list has yet to be made public nine years after APC grabbed and snatched power. We are Nigerians and we live in Nigeria. Nine years and no questions have been asked of those who alleged the creation of snipers and the risks to their lives. In the Buhari era, Amaechi was transportation minister and a confidant of the former failed president, while el-Rufair was governor of Kaduna State and a power-broker in Abuja. So it could not be said that they couldn’t uncover the identities of the snipers and their hit list on account of their powerlessness.
The change of governing personnel in 2023 cannot unmake the duplicity of the APC. The party was founded on propaganda. It was nurtured in propaganda. It acceded to power in Abuja through propaganda, including the campaign to occupy Nigeria in 2012 when Jonathan increased the prices of petroleum products. The former governor of Ekiti State and opposition brainbox, Dr. John Kayode Fayemi, has since confessed that their 2012 fuel price protest was founded on lies. And that they knew it even then. Even Tinubu has demonstrated that he was being evil and mischievous by implementing the very policy he warned Jonathan not to contemplate in an epistle he wrote to the former president in 2012.
Nigeria’s now president, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, one year in office last month, has taken the dubious devices of the APC to a whole new level. He is a master of double speak and a practiced purveyor of falsehood. His acolytes deem him to be a strategic politician. Probably, he is. But he is not a deep thinker. Tinubu’s supporters position him as a pro-democracy activist using his alleged role in the National Democratic Coalition [NADECO] during military rule as a pointer. But he is not a democrat. Apart from what will personally benefit him, Tinubu is known to be generally contemptuous of people. Lagos State presents a classical example. His iron grip on the state during and since after his governorship of the state in 2007 has remained suffocating. Besides, the late activist Yinka Odumakin once called him out for running with the hares and hunting with the predators during the NADECO struggle with the late Gen. Sani Abacha. There is no record in the public domain known to me that Tinubu ever refuted that weighty assertion, which was widely publicized.
Nobody needs to go in search of long gone history for evidence that Tinubu is contemptuous of Nigerians. He never felt obligated to participate in town hall meetings with other presidential candidates nor engage in televised live debates in spite of repeated invitations. His followers will ascribe his conduct to political sagacity. No, it was not. It was a palpable display and demonstration of his contempt for Nigerians and disdain for accountability to the electorate. He was cocksure that victory in that election was a foregone conclusion, credible election or not. And so why bother in explaining his vision for the country that had been wracked by the patented maladministration of Buhari, his party man? We gave Tinubu a pass on accountability during the campaign that led to the presidential election of February 2023, and that pass has returned to haunt us.
On May 29, 2023, Tinubu declared from the presidential dais at his inauguration that “petrol subsidy is gone.” He said there was no provision for the payment of petrol subsidy in the second half of the 2023 national budget. He believed that he was speaking with the finality of an oracle. When he abolished petrol subsidy, strictly speaking, there was no government in place. No ministers, no advisers, no assistants and no economic team. It was a whimsical decision. He himself confirmed it when he said that the pronouncement was not in the written inauguration speech. He said he was suddenly “possessed of courage” to abolish petrol subsidy. In effect the decision was not attended by vigour and rigour and critical consultations with stakeholders. Minds were not averted to the inevitable deleterious fallouts of that decision and how to mitigate them. With matters such as this, we are wont to say that the rest is history. But in this case it is not so. The effects of that irrational decision are still living with us. Nigerians are experiencing grinding poverty. There is widespread gnashing of teeth. Citizens are daily dropping below the poverty line. Renewed Hope, the mantra of the regime, has since become Renewed Hopelessness. Nigerians never contemplated that any regime could be worse than Buhari’s.
The entitlement syndrome encapsulated in Tinubu’s emi lokan and the penchant of the people to give a pass to a politician, any politician, seeking a high office has returned to haunt us with vengeance. “Subsidy is gone” has turned out to be a lie. Soon after that declaration petrol subsidy returned with the massive and continuing devaluation of the Naira since June 2023. The country has been left to grapple with a harvest of calamities. Every economic indicator has gone north while citizens’ standard of living has gone south. General inflation is drastically up. Food inflation is worse at over 40%. Unemployment is high with youth unemployment frighteningly at over 60%. And the youth constitute about three quarters of the country’s population estimated to be about 220 million. Local firms are closing shops while transnational corporations are fleeing the country citing unfriendly operating environment. The other day an American agency said the US government hosted the Kenyan President, William Ruto, to a state visit because its traditional partner in Africa, Nigeria, has been weakened economically, diplomatically and militarily. What a testimonial! But it is our reality.
Our other dangerous reality is the growing impunity of the Tinubu regime on accountability. The World Bank, other relevant global agencies, Nigerians, critical and ranking stakeholders, some members of the ruling party and indeed some regime officials have acknowledged the existence of fuel subsidy. And that the amount of money being spent on the so-called petrol subsidy has got bigger than before it was abolished one year ago. Sometimes the amount already spent and the sum projected to be spent by the end of this year are let out in error. Last week Wednesday, Mr. Wale Edun, minister of finance and coordinating minister of the economy, disclosed that N3.6 trillion was expended on petrol subsidy in 2023, the same year when subsidy was said to have been scrapped. He typically did not say that the sum was incurred in the first half of that year when the so-called petrol subsidy was still officially subsisting. He further disclosed that petrol subsidy has been projected to consume N5.4 trillion by end-December 2024. His words in a draft report of the Accelerated Stabilization and Advancement Plan [ASAP]: “At current rates, expenditure on fuel subsidy is projected to reach N5.4 trillion by the end of 2024. This compares unfavourably with N3.6 trillion in 2023 and N2.0 trillion in 2022”. In other words, their fuel subsidy payments have been increasing exponentially since the ‘subsidy is gone’ statement was made last year.
This development throws up many questions and posers. For a start, there was no budgetary provision for petrol subsidy payment in the second half of 2023, yet N3.6 trillion was expended. Was that sum for payment of subsidy between January and May of 2023? In the national budget for 2024, there was nary provision for payment of fuel subsidy. Now we have been told in a document that the regime describes as unofficial that the sum of N5.4 trillion will be sunk into paying petrol subsidy in 2024. If there was no budgetary provision for subsidy payment for the second half of last year, and there was no provision at all for subsidy payment in the 2024 budget, from where then is the regime sourcing a cumulative N9.0 trillion, bar any provisions for January-May of 2023, to offset the so-called petrol subsidy? The law prohibits payment of such bills unless the money for payment had been appropriated by the National Assembly. So far this year the regime is yet to request for supplementary budget. And the one it requested and got approval for late last year did not include provisions for payment of fuel subsidy. Sadly, this NASS is an extension of the Executive branch of government, not the first estate of the realm it was supposed to be. This is the danger in giving potential rulers a pass at any stage of the contest for high office or any office for that matter. The history and political trajectory of Tinubu is such that should have alerted Nigerians on the imperatives of accountability and transparency. And paying premium for them. As we say around here, the problem is not giving a baboon water to quench its thirst, it is in retrieving the cup.
The suspicion is on the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited [NNPCL] for the shady petrol subsidy payments. It is the ATM [automated teller machine] of successive federal administrations. It’s the warehouse for every president’s slush and illicit money. NNPCL’s operations are so opaque that former Central Bank governor and now Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, has been screaming blue murder and asking where the dollar earnings of the corporation have been disappearing into in the last 10 years. Could that explain why Mele Kyari has been a permanent fixture as the group chief executive of the company. Tinubu has removed virtually all the heads of similar agencies but not Kyari. Shouldn’t this be concerning?