Whether President Bola Tinubu exhibited extraordinary courage speaking about removing subsidy on Premium Motor Spirit at his inauguration is debatable.
Secondly, the Petroleum Industry Act, of 2021 has already initiated a new legal and governance structure for the oil and gas sector, and payment of subsidies has no place there. In fact, but for the incompetence of the Muhammadu Buhari administration, which suspended the implementation of the Act, Nigeria would, by now, have taken its baby steps and contended with the initial challenges of the policy. But our leaders, taking governance for a joke, are mostly after populism.
One of the most phenomenal stories of the rebirth of nations is Singapore under the leadership of the inimitable Lee Kuan Yew. Yew went on prime-time television to say that these men were stupid, which brought consternation. To douse the tension, he presented a 1980 study conducted in Minnesota, United States, showing that nearly 80 percent of a person’s makeup is from nature and about 20 percent from nurture. He established a Social Development Unit headed by a lady who exemplified his vision to facilitate the actualisation of the revolution he envisioned.
Indeed, the opacity in the oil and gas sector makes the petrol subsidy a corruption haven. There are arguments that Nigeria would do much better subsidising production than consumption. This is even though petrol is a factor of production for many small and medium-scale enterprises in the country. They also say that the masses only have tokenistic benefits from the tonnes of money invested in fuel subsidies.
How do you justify fostering economic hardship on the people when government officials throw ostentation in their faces? When politicians live large amid the same people who strive to survive? How is it that in all the years that we have attempted to remove subsidy, successive governments have failed to strengthen the processes and remove some, if not all, of the opacity around governance? It is so bad that the immediate past President went from declaring that there was nothing like subsidy in...