WHEN President Bola Ahmed Tinubu announced the removal of the subsidy on petrol in his inaugural speech on May 29, 2023, most Nigerians supported it and praised him for the decision. The support he received was not because the people enjoyed the pain that came with buying fuel at exorbitant rates.

It was not because they could not see the value of buying their fuel per litre at a rate friendly to their purses. Nor was it because they thought there was something wrong with the idea that every responsible government around the world subsides important commodities and services for the benefit of their people. Rather, they supported the decision and hailed President Tinubu because the fuel subsidy regime had been grossly mismanaged by previous governments and leaders that had led the country in the last four decades. 

This was the basis of the rejection of President Goodluck Jonathan’s attempt to remove oil subsidy in January 2012. Nigerians opposed it because they could not see the effect of the so-called subsidy in their lives. They opposed the corruption in which subsidy payment and the Jonathan administration was enveloped. But opposition politicians, including President Tinubu and his predecessor in office, told the world that oil subsidy was a well-packaged scam. 

Nothing was being subsidised they said. They all but called the Jonathan administration a government of magicians that was adept at conjuring phantom figures to support their payment of subsidy claim. Nigerians now know better despite the failed effort of the Buhari administration to split hair about the meaning of subsidy.

That government went on with the incoherent talk of “under recovery” or paying the difference between “pump price and landing cost”. It was loathe to admit the simple fact that it was wrong to have totally written off the idea that subsidy was being paid on petrol in those years when it was in opposition. The more so because under its own watch, nobody knew where the billions of dollars with which it funded the importation of fuel or where the fuel that was imported went. All Nigerians knew was that there was a thriving illegal trade in petrol along Nigeria’s borders with neighbouring countries. Nigerians only heard of the billions set aside for subsidy but felt nothing of it. 

This was especially the case in the last eight years of the Muhammadu Buhari administration during which criminal elements masquerading as oil marketers smiled to the bank with billions of unearned dollars for providing fuel at so-called subsidised rates. Yet for long periods at a time, Nigerians queued at fuel stations for fuel they had to buy at high costs that were way higher than they should be doing for a subsidised product.

It was a double whammy, paying highly for a product that was either not available or that was contaminated when available. For the last two years of the Buhari government, for example, there were regular spells of fuel scarcity, times when fuel stations had no fuel to sell and when Nigerians had to pay three times more than was legally approved. They went through a hell of time while President Buhari remained ensconced in the cozy ambience of Aso Villa blissfully unaware of what the people were passing through. 

These were the circumstances that weaned Nigerians off the notion of subsidy payment and made them receptive to Tinubu’s rather unceremonious abrogation of the subsidy regime. It’s important that these facts are put in perspective in order to dispel the view in some quarters that the people had been rendered somnolent by the spiels of a master manipulator and the paid agents of the Bretton Wood and World Bank institutions that are in strategic positions of power.

Yes, many of them exist and they have not been silent in their praise of President Tinubu, but it would be stretching the truth to say that they and only they brought Nigerians to that position where they were ready to accept the removal of the subsidy on fuel. Which is to say that the Nigerian people are long-suffering but it would be a huge mistake for any government or leader to take them for granted. 

Thus, while President Tinubu has not ordered any increment in the price of fuel, his policy pronouncements which his major opponents subscribed to as far as it concerns the removal of fuel subsidy, is fast immiserating Nigerians, making them beggars and leaving them rudderless in their own country. The only person they can see and hold responsible for now is President Tinubu and the administration he leads. This government is just two months in office but nobody would be concerned about that should the people’s anger, now simmering, boil over. The government needs to move fast and urgently too to ameliorate the pains the Nigerian people are presently experiencing. It should be a matter of grave concern to any government that hundreds of millions of Nigerians have been grounded and are unable to carry out their daily activities, not even go out to make a living. 

The streets are deserted and traffic is strangely light even in hitherto busy commercial centres. Now fuel is available nationwide in most fuel stations but Nigerians can’t afford it. It’s both sad and concerning that many Nigerians who have cars and other means of transportation have chosen to abandon them as they could no longer afford the cost of fuel. This is the time the government needs to step up. This is the time that shows what makes a great leader and leadership.

Although it has jettisoned the badly conceived idea it inherited from the Buhari administration of transferring cash to Nigerians, the fact that the Tinubu government gave it any consideration at all undermines its readiness for innovative governance. The problem it faces is not one at which you throw money. Money for how many Nigerians? What can N8,000 over a six months period do for 12 million of the estimated 160 million Nigerians, mostly in the private sector, that live below the poverty threshold? 

President Bola Tinubu must in concert with the state governments address the immediate issue of transportation by providing means of mass transit. Nigerians have to make a living and they won’t do that where they can’t step out of their homes. While this would have overall positive effect on food prices, the question of food inflation has to be directly confronted. At some point, there has to be an upward review of wages while government takes appropriate steps to cut the cost of governance at all levels and see about the refinement of petrol locally. These are some of the much-touted “low hanging fruits” for this government. It has to do this now or the consequences of failure would be very dire.