By Victor AHIUMA-YOUNG
UNITED Action for Democracy, UAD, one of the civil society allies of Labour,  has said among the major shortcomings of the Subsidy Re-investment and Empowerment Programme, SURE, introduced by the Federal Government in the wake of January 1, 2012 hike in the pump price of petrol, is that SURE has no plan to reduce the level of imported fuel in the next four years.

In an appraisal of SURE at a one-day seminar organized by Labour Writers Association of Nigeria, LAWAN, in Lagos, Convener of UAD, Mr. Jaye Gaskia, argued that what that meant was that the Nigeria would continue to be dependent on importation of refined products, as at present, if not at increasing levels over the four year period.

According to him, the SURE programme in its original form before its withdrawal is at best a deceptive collection of programs into a wish list. A programme that will be implemented requires more serious approach; it requires a strategic, operational and implementation, as well as investment plan.

SURE was none of these. The SURE programme had no sense of the strategic linkages of the infrastructure projects; there was no prioritization; no costing, and no timeline for implementation (no start and end dates for the projects).

There was also no indication of what each will cost to implement, what the total cost for the entire package is; what part of the budget the subsidy reinvested fund will cover; what the funding gap will be; and how this funding gap will be filled.

What is even more appalling and an indication of the shoddiness of its preparation as well as the inbuilt deception in the program is the fact that ongoing projects for which contracts have been signed were severally included in the SURE pot-pori of critical infrastructure interventions.”

“Additionally as we now know thanks to the subsidy probes at the National Assembly, NASS, the funding regime was based absolutely on guesses not on empirical information. No body as at the time the program was being put together had any idea about the true cost of the subsidy fraud, which we now know cost us well over 2 trillion naira in 2011.

Even now no one is certain what the actual daily consumption rate for petrol is, the actual amount we pay for per day, the actual daily production rate of existing refineries; much less a sense of determining what the actual short fall in daily supply is, which will require an actual quantity of refined products per day.

What is perhaps more shocking with respect to revealing the mind of the regime, is the shocking assumption, that the subsidy programme was designed on the basis of an annual available funding of 478 billion naira over a four year period.

Why is this shocking and scandalous? Precisely because it assumes no reduction in the quantity of imported refined product per day, translating into an assumption or rather more appropriately, an intention to keep current domestic refining capacity at 2011 levels over the four year period.”

Gaskia contended that “the implication of this is that no additional domestic refining capacity will be acquired over the four year period, and we will continue to be dependent on importation of refined products, at current, if not at increasing levels over the four year period.