Northern Groups Back Tinubu On Subsidy Removal

No fewer than 150 civil society organisations (CSOs) and non-government organisations (NGOs) under the auspices of Coalition of Northern Groups (CNG) have endorsed President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s removal of fuel subsidy.

The groups which took a swipe at former President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration for allegedly pursuing unpopular deregulation programmes while maintaining the ‘fraudulent subsidy regime’ and further plunging the nation into deeper crisis and mass suffering, said $15.6billion spent annually on subsidy could build railway from Lagos to Kano, Port-Harcourt to Maiduguri and Lagos to Calabar combined.

Reading the communique issued at the end of the town hall meeting in Kaduna yesterday, the chairman of communique drafting committee and spokesman of CNG, Abdul-Azeez Suleiman, said N2.91 trillion spent by the federal government on petrol subsidy between January and September 2022, was largely responsible for the country’s dwindling public finances.

He said available data has exposed the unforgivable level of disabling corruption perpetrated with the subsidy regime in favour of a few individuals at the expense of public projects that cost less than Nigeria’s $15.6 billion annual subsidy.

Suleiman said the amount spent annually on subsidy is far more than what is required to build railways from Lagos to Kano, Port-Harcourt to Maiduguri and Wembley-like stadiums in each of Nigeria’s six geo-political zones.

According to him, “Successive governments in Nigeria have tried and failed to remove or cut the subsidy, which has greatly constrained Nigeria’s development goals, as the subsidies mostly only benefit a few wealthy households.

“Concerned by the backlash from some quarters that followed the announcement of the withdrawal of the subsidies by the President, CNG convened a one-day stakeholder roundtable of all its 150 affiliates and other northern interest groups at the Arewa House, Kaduna today, June 6, 2023.

“At the end of the Townhall discussions, the following inevitable observations were drawn: That generally, subsidy is an evil that subsequent previous governments groomed and fed fat all these years to the detriment of the masses. That all along, the oil subsidy has been a conduit pipe for siphoning public funds for the benefit of a very few members of a powerful cartel at the expense of the entire nation.

“That since assumption of office, the former President Muhammadu Buhari had made several promises of rehabilitating the nation’s refineries, all of which he failed to fulfill. Instead, he pursued unpopular deregulation programmes while maintaining the fraudulent subsidy regime and further plunging the nation into deeper crisis and mass suffering.

“That on emergence as Nigeria’s new President, Bola Tinubu disclosed that the current budget handed over to him by former President Buhari did not provide for the petrol subsidy and therefore it is gone, which did not go down well with the exploiter class that benefits from the subsidy budgets.

”Since Tinubu’s announcement of the removal of the fuel subsidy, the cartel that has been reaping its benefits at the expense of the suffering masses, has waged a campaign about the fictitious knock-on effects that it will have on the daily lives of Nigerians,” Suleiman said.