WEDNESDAY COLUMN BY USSIJU MEDANER
info@medaner.com, justme4justice@yahoo.com
It seems the aftermath of the presidential election would not be leaving us so soon. The anomalies and the ‘behind-the-scenes’ that characterised the electoral period continue to unravel – the unpatriotic actions of some actors in the elections who went overboard to get involved to win the election by all means. We have been worried enough that rather than moving away from the religious and tribal fault lines in the country and the effects that have slowed our progress, the 2023 elections have come to deepen and broaden the wound. And now, the new revelation coming from the latest leaked audio of the conversation between the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Mr. Peter Obi and the General Overseer of the Living Faith church, Bishop Oyedepo is too depressing and unbecoming of the aspiration we all have for the country.
I had hoped it wasn’t real; that by some means it would be confirmed by Deep Fake or any similar tools as some quarters projected, but unfortunately, it isn’t. So, here we are, in the open, knowing that a presidential candidate, that believed by many of his followers to be their messiah and their best among the contenders; the one who has the best interest of Nigeria and the people of Nigeria at heart, to set right the many wrongs created by past administrations and heal many wounds of our people, is actually a religious and tribal bigot, whose most potent card to win the election was religion and tribal segmentation.
We had been worried all along that Peter Obi built a cult-based followership on a very faulty religious and tribal foundation, but we didn’t know all along that for the man Obi, it was actually not a democratic tussle but a ‘religious war’ in his own words. The ‘take back your country’ rhetoric can now be fully comprehended; he meant to set the people against one another on the very sensitive religious front.
The party and its candidate made very extreme religious political moves during the campaign, manipulating and exploiting our religious and cultural diversities and the sensitivities to their advantage. We only heard the conversation with one clergy; there definitely would be others made to other clergies for the same purpose. Obi was practically sending the pastors to preach religious war across pulpits in the country. No wonder, the churches became a volatile campaign field weeks and days to the election, and several prominent pastors took the election outcome as a personal injury because their efforts did not pay off.
We should be grateful to God and the sensible population of the electorate that roundly served all religious bigots the deserved defeats at the poll; and you won’t be wrong if you said they have been served breakfast! We had warned Nigerians repeatedly before the election, pointing to Peter Obi’s religious bigotry antecedents as governor of Anambra state; how he was absolutely hostile to the Muslim community and created a great gulf between the Catholics and other Christian faithful in his home state.
Anyway, it is better we have come to the knowledge of the reality of the person we dealt with and fully in the know of why the religious clerics went overboard to abuse their positions to install one of their own on the country.
This week however, after this little diversion, my intent is to x-ray the national subsidy regime vis-à-vis the pros and cons. I have been for years a proponent of fuel subsidy removal; that is, because beyond the public sentiments of opposing the policy, I have always seen the needed reasons why removing it would be a plus to the country. I have concluded the only reason why economic advisers and all foreign economic bodies would insist nonstop since the Babangida regime that the way out of the nation’s woes in her management of the oil and gas industry would be the removal of the subsidy, can only be because it is the way out. Definitely from an economic point of view, removing fuel subsidy is a much needed decision for the country, and one that is long due.
It is obvious that the continuous regime of fuel subsidy in the country has been more favourable to the corrupt elite along the corridors of influence and power. There have been arguments for a doctored daily consumption figure for the country overtime, and we have repeatedly submitted that there is no way the country would consume sixty percent of the figure in the public domain. The arguments are simple; juxtaposing with nations with similar population size and distribution as Nigeria do not support the presented figures, as much as the current figures do not correlate with any forecast figure from time series analysis of our past populations and PMS consumption figures.
If that has been the case, and we have been paying subsidies for extreme figures of PMS not consumed by Nigerians on a daily basis, where has the money been going? Who have been the beneficiaries of the corrupt largesse? And does it continue?
Another sacrosanct submission from the Nigeria petroleum subsidy regime is the reality of the mass exportation of the product to our neighbouring nations immediately after subsidy payment by the federal government. It is obvious and uncontested that after the Nigeria government has paid subsidy on this product, a sizable portion finds their way out of the country to be resold at an even higher rate. The perpetrators collected subsidies from the Nigerian government and still sell the product at even higher cost, making triple returns on a product meant for the Nigeria market and Nigeria people. Even at the crux of border closure of the past years, the product smuggling refuses to abate. A visit to the Benin Republic would be a perfect testament to this reality. While the official pump price of the product is 650 CFA, the roadside, littered with smuggled products from Nigeria sell for as little as 400 CFA.
For the stated reason, except it is possible to end the impunity of bloated figures and smuggling of the product, maintaining the subsidy regime would never be a positive for the country regardless of all street sentiments.
However, there is a second face to the argument for subsidy removal; this I have been quiet about until now, but I have come to the realisation that until we can create a balance for all sides, removing or not removing would always create a one sided effect on sections of the country.
The Nigeria masses dependence on the cost of petroleum products cannot be easily waved aside in the consideration of cost and subsidy regime in the country. Virtually, an average Nigerian man’s daily life is woven around fuel availability and cost. The most obvious and effective is transportation cost; living in the suburb of FCT, for instance, a roundtrip to work on a daily basis may cost as much as one thousand five hundred naira, that being twenty four thousand naira monthly on a minimum wage of thirty thousand naira. With the suspected level of increment that is expected with subsidy removal, this transport cost might go up by as much as 150 percent to thirty six thousand naira a month; only on transportation.
The cost of general goods is another major challenge. We all know what happens the moment fuel cost increases, market prices respond; the common man would again be faced with the burden of increased cost of goods all the way from staples, to even bills. Access to services would similarly respond to the change; from accessing health care facilities, to visiting barbershop, Nigerians would have to pay exorbitantly more, all on the meagre working wage regime in the country.
Apparently, while on the government side, subsidy removal would spare huge capital for infrastructural development and eases the burden of debt on the nation, the impact on the common man that constitutes the bulk of the national population is clearly negative and huge. The federal government cannot afford to consider the eventual termination of the subsidy regime without sacrosanct arrangements to address the burden of the Nigerian citizens.
If the challenge is the landing cost of PMS, I am of the opinion that rather than heaping the burden on the street, the government would rather be proactive in turning the hands of the process to either minimise or even totally do away with the importation of finished petroleum products. We can do this; all we need to do is to truly commence the process of genuine turnaround of the nation’s existing refining or invest on building one new national refining to complement the almost completed Dangote refinery alongside all existing and incoming modular refineries in the country being operational and supplementing the national product requirements. If we can do away with importation, we would also be able to stop talking about oil subsidies without heaping any of such burden on Nigerians, particularly the masses. If Dangote can build a refinery in six years, NNPC can make a similar investment on behalf of Nigeria and even in a shorter time.
Another potential solution to the challenge of the subsidy regime in the country is open for us all to embrace; and that is the CNG pathway for powering the bulk of our automobiles. For a country richly blessed in gas deposits, going the way of CNG cars, CNG retrofitted cars or dual powered cars would be an easy route out of the current PMS challenge of the country. If we can have as much as 60 percent of the cars on our roads running on the much cheaper and safer gas, the discussion of high transportation cost and its effects on movements and cost of general goods wouldn’t surface; and of course the nation’s over reliance of PMS would literally fizzles out.
I sincerely do hope the administration of the incoming president would be bold enough to recognise these pros and cons with regard to the oil subsidy regime and be able to face the challenge with an attitude to engage a perfect and permanent solution for Nigeria. I do also have no doubt that a man who could confront the Atlantic Ocean and create a mega city from it wouldn’t be afraid of doing, and even surmounting greater national challenges as the nation’s oil and gas sector presents.
GOD BLESS THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA!
