Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Yusuf Tuggar has attributed the current waves of hardships ravaging Nigerians to the country’s past policies, global calamities and other factors.
“With regards to the unfortunate unavoidable hardships that we are going through in Nigeria, this is something that has long been coming because of our policies in the past and also because of other factors we have no control over,” he said.
The minister explained that the global economy itself is suffering because of so many issues including the global financial meltdown in 2008, followed by other unavailable calamities that befell the world.
He recalled that the world as a whole witnessed the Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) where borders were closed, movement of goods, services and people came to a halt, and so many people lost their lives.
Tuggar, who was fielding questions from journalist in Bauchi on Saturday, explained that these calamities affected the cost of living all over the world with Nigeria not an exception.
“There has been a lot of linkages, trade between countries, movement of people between countries, all of that were affected. So, the prices went up, and Nigeria over the years has been importing petrol that we have been using here.”
“We had four refineries, one of which was built in the 60s in Port Harcourt, 2nd in Port Harcourt which was larger, the Kaduna Refinery, and the Warri Refinery. These refineries were built when the Nigerian population was much smaller than it is today.”
The minister noted that today Nigeria has a population of about 220 million, thereby jerking up the consumption of petroleum, when the country has over the years not been investing in expanding and refining capacities.
He stated that the country is now importing more petrol whereas its price globally is going up, adding that the hardships were compounded by the issues of exchange rates, which is equally affected by the fuel subsidy, subsidizing consumption, not production.
“If we are subsidizing consumption and not subsidizing production, because what we are really doing over those years was to be subsidizing production, subsidizing industries, so that our industries would prosper, but unfortunately, a lot of money was going towards subsidizing the importation of petroleum products.”
