President Goodluck Jonathan on Thursday launched a fresh
campaign to totally remove the subsidy on fuel, barely a year after a similar
campaign and forceful removal of subsidy almost brought the country to a
standstill.
Jonathan said only the total removal
of subsidy on petroleum products would attract investors to the oil sector and
put an end to the importation of petroleum products as it is currently being
done.
About this time last year, the
President, in his budget estimates submitted to the Senate, proposed total
removal of subsidy on petroleum products and in spite of public protests
removed subsidy on January 1, 2012.
The President’s action was greeted by
spontaneous protests among the citizens.
A mass action coordinated by civil
society groups paralysed activities in the country for about two weeks until
the government backpedalled and announced a partial removal. Per litre pump
price of petrol was consequently reduced to N97 from the initial N141 under the
zero-subsidy regime.
The pump price of the product
pre-January 1, 2012 was N65.
Jonathan started the fresh campaign
to totally remove subsidy while receiving the report of the graduating
participants of the Senior Executive Course 34, 2012, of the National Institute
of Policy and Strategic Studies, Kuru, near Jos, at the Presidential Villa,
Abuja.
“Why is it that people are not
building refineries in Nigeria despite that it is a big business? It is because
of the policy of subsidy, and that is why we want to get out of it,” the
President said.
Like the President did late last
year, he argued that while the total removal of subsidy could be painful to
Nigerians he said they would be happier at the end if they could bear the
initial pains.
Jonathan said, “To change a nation is
like surgery. If you have a young daughter of five years who has a boil at a
very strategic part of the face, you either as a parent leave that boil because
the young girl will cry or you take the girl to the surgeon.
“So you have the option of just
robbing metholatum on the face until the boil will burst
and disfigure her face or you take that child to the surgeon. On the sighting
of a scalpel of the surgeon alone, the child will start crying.
“But if she bears the pains and do
the incision and treat it, after some days or weeks, the child will grow up to
be a beautiful lady.
“There are certain decisions that
government must take that may be painful at the beginning and people must be
properly informed so that they will be ready to bear the pains.”
Jonathan said he believed that
Nigeria could witness a turn-around within 10 years once the right policies
were put in place.
“I believe that you do not need a
lifetime to change a nation. Under 10 years, Nigeria can change and people will
not even believe that this is Nigeria again. Immediately you come up with
strong policies in key sectors of the economy and keep it for 10 years, the
change will be astronomical,” he said.
He said Canada had 16 functional
refineries and Nigeria has four that are struggling to refine at 30 per cent of
installed capacity because all the refineries in Canada are privately-owned.
In the aftermath of the January
protests and in the desire to assuage ill feeling of citizens over large scale
corruption in the oil sector, Jonathan had promised to probe the sector.
The probe committee set up by the
House of Representatives subsequently found that oil thieves had defrauded the
country of N1.7trn under the fuel subsidy regime. Many suspects, including a
son of the chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, Mahmud Tukur, and children
of other notable Nigerians and their companies, are currently on trial for
making claims for fuel not imported.
Curiously, the nation has been
suffering from acute shortage of fuel for almost two months with filling
stations selling, unofficially, at between N100 and N150 per litre.
The situation has also made critics
to submit that the shortage, notwithstanding official explanations, might be a
design by the government to surreptitiously increase fuel pump price in the new
year.