Emissions of rackets about the fuel subsidy removal are going through the chimney of controversies and the President, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, has a big one up his sleeve to roll into resolve. There is now a groundswell of meetings for Tinubu to convey at this ticking of clock. Some of the meetings are going to be intelligible and some will be unintelligible. Some of such meetings will be coming about with the colouration of patriotism, while some will be shown as naked order of political vindictiveness and self-serving examples.
During his inauguration, the President was not ambivalent about his standpoint on the fuel subsidy removal. To him, the removal is a promise kept. “Subsidy is gone ..,” he announced to all. The main reason to bid farewell to fuel subsidy existence lies in the secret place of Tinubu’s mind while the sub-reason is common in the poor state of wellbeing of the Nigerian people.
Tinubu knows he has a government to run and in the element of a leader who came to accept the responsibility of the vulnerable, the aged, the needy, the unemployed, the sick, the weak and other categories, he was prompt to note that expenditures for populist purposes are far the largest demands than the humongous ‘unsubstantiated’ fuel subsidy distributed among a few who are socially called the cabals.
He is aware that the short but sharp economic depression experienced in 2021 stimulated interest in the possibility that fiscal operations might be shaped to head off recession and mitigate the suffering of the people, only if state actors in various responsibilities are righteous with public funds. The failure to adhere to moral principles is what we guess, the President is about to pull out into naught.
This indicates that with Tinubu, fuel subsidy is pushing cyclical counterweight effect and relegating government expenditures on masses affairs into the background and this is inadequate for the current social emergency.
Through subsidy, many citizens argue that some class of Nigerians have been hugely empowered than they can be controlled or be subordinate to any government in place in this country and this expands the fears that those citizens in that category are only designed to direct and monopolise the commonwealth of the country with unbridled impunity.
Some put up striking arguments that are consistent with Tinubu’s action. They sound patriotic, giving that the balance of argument presentation is naught when the masses of the Nigerian people go to bed without a hope of a living. What an injection of intelligence into the conversation!
Now that partisan controversies on the fuel subsidy removal have not subsided, we have a duty to do an appraisal of it objectively. While some see the President’s action to remove the subsidy as a stab in the dark, undertaken without any sound measures of the magnitude of economic needs, some say Tinubu’s position falls considerably short of hopes for the Nigerian masses who have been distressed with its attendant pains.
A school of thought says in some respects that the subsidy-granting as a programme of the past governments was self-defeating in that the magnitude of federal spending, stupendous as they were, still proved inadequate to the task of benefits to the Nigerian masses.
It can generally be witnessed by Nigerians that despite the so-called fuel subsidy ‘payment’ to some marketers the nation still suffers economic backlash. The payment is therefore draped in doubts and suspicions that thrust it into attention and precise questions are issuing forth.
Who were those being paid the money before Tinubu came on board? How much exactly were paid so far? Is there no procedure for recording government transactions? We have to talk about basic principles now. As much as a subsidy is a good economic fiscal practice in the world, undertaken by the government of a country to pep up the purchasing ability of citizens on specific economic aspects of their existence, there is array of unimpeachable questions hanging underneath the matter of fuel subsidy in Nigeria which reasonably cannot attract faults.
Unlike private business accounting which solves its problems on the basis of experience, reason and experiment, much of procedures of government accounting is determined by law. What law does Nigeria have as a nation to implement subsidy? What law? Government accounting must operate within the framework of laws which create arbitrary ‘funds’ earmarkable for subsidies.
Within this framework, sound accounting principles derived from business fields or evolved by reason and testing may be applied to give a strong meaning to subsidy payment. All these are not in place in our situation. What definition can we therefore give to this subsidy of a thing other than fraud?
Every scope of government has its doctrine. This may be collectivistic or critical. The government must have its fiscal purpose as the bedrock for its operation. A government must sit thinking and arrange its status established in order of importance or urgency. Is it going to expend funds to dredge river channels, or to subsidize petroleum products?
Should it pay workers and spend on building more schools and more farm estates, etc? All these questions are ever recurrent and consistently debated vital political issues. They are facts of funds deployment query, and this government is too young in the day to be responsive to calls of a clique that has never experienced how the shoe pinches common Nigerians in their poor state of existence.
The initiative to increase workers salary scales as fender against the attendant hardship of fuel subsidy removal, is an indolent proposal which can only come from a non-caring government. It is a woeful economic suggestion made by unpatriotic elements in government and except they can prove that the buffers are due to government workers because other citizens are not part of the agony of the bad state of our economy. Tinubu should not have anything to do with such crawlers in his government. How can we go about the situation?
Tinubu needs a new theory of government expenditure at the fore. The country needs pump-priming or compensatory spending. The Federal Government, and to a lesser extent, the states and localities, ought to prime the economy by special rapid large-scale expenditures financed by production.
This will provide work relief with any public projects of any sort that could immediately be devised to create jobs, and such made employments would maintain morale and provide the unemployed with purchasing power, which their spending would put into circulation. This is followed by the home relief allowances to the needy and the aged who could not be employed. This would relieve suffering and also push purchasing power into circulation…and the economy will have a facelift.
But Tinubu must heed a caution coming from the apprehensions by the education stakeholders on the consequence of an attempt to jerk up tuition fees in federal schools. This will sculpt a portrait of Tinubu as a tax-master who gifts with the right hand but retrieves same with the left.
