Fuel subsidy removal saved Nigeria from total collapse – Dele Alake

By Jude Opara

The Minister of Solid Minerals, Dele Alake has described President Bola Tinubu’s administration as the most passionate and courageous government to ever pilot the affairs of the country.

Addressing newsmen in his office on Wednesday, Alake said unknown to many people, the courage displayed by President Tinubu on his inauguration day to have removed the controversial fuel subsidy saved the country’s economy from total collapse.

He argued that the ongoing complaints by Nigerians is normal because it is associated with the initial pain, which he argued will very soon evaporate when the citizens will begin to enjoy the benefits of the policy.

“And talking about the President we have today, I smile at the ignorance of those who believe that he is a dictator, he’s a good person. There is no politician in the political firmament of Nigeria today, to the best of my knowledge, who is more of a democrat than President Tinubu.

“And there are empirical verification on ground. I worked with him before he was governor, during his reformation, and after, up to today. So I’m not speaking out of partisanship.

“I’m speaking from personal conviction, because I was part and parcel of some of those neoliberal policies that transformed Lagos into the fifth largest economy in Africa today. It wasn’t out of wishful thinking. It wasn’t by happenstance. It wasn’t by accident. It was through meticulous analysis, conceptualisation, enunciation, execution, and monitoring of correct policies, to turn around the economy of Lagos. And you are all familiar with the story”.

According to him, what Nigerians are facing is not peculiar because some other countries that equally took such bold decisions also faced even worse situations before they eventually balanced.

“In fact, if you’re also a student of history, you will know that in this act, we are even better off than a lot of those international societies, in terms of the time that it’s taken us to reach the level that we are today.

“And some years back, even in the years during the elections, it was an issue of guns. They would come to polling centres with brandishing guns and all of that, shoot sporadically, carry ballot boxes and all of those things. It went on for years, and it took a process of development, of refactoring, before they reached where they are today.

“And there is no shortcut. What we can do is to learn from the mistakes of those people and try as much as possible to avoid such errors, or meander through such errors. So there is nothing new that we can go through, especially when you are trying to restructure the badly damaged economy as a whole”.

Aleke further stated that before the advent of the Tinubu administration in 2023, the nation’s economy was already nosediving, due largely because of the lack of courage by successive governments to take some of those needed hard decisions.

“It does not need me to tell you or elaborate the fact that we knew what the Nigerian economy was before 2023. And it does not need me to inform you that all the reforms and the policies that were and are necessary to correct these distortions and contradictions in the Nigerian society were there and identifiable by those previous governments. The only thing lacking was the courage to take those decisions.

“Our elders say, when you are in a hole, what do you do? You stop digging. Because the more you dig, the deeper you sink. But because those previous governments lacked that courage to stop digging, for short-term political expedience, they were afraid of elections, they were afraid of bringing them back to office and all that. So they shifted those decisions, the hard decisions they ought to have taken”.

The Minister added that contrary to the propaganda of those whom he said benefited from the subsidy regime, it was only the cartels and their cronies that were benefiting from what he termed the wasteful and corruption laden oil subsidy regime.