Fuel price hike: Rescue from suicide? -By Fola Ojo

Fola Ojo

It filtered through media outlets like a hot knife through a pack of cheddar-cheese. My first instinctive reaction was a grizzle. Fuel is N145 per litre in Nigeria? With pervasive pain and poverty in the land, how can this be? Is this change?  This sounds like a slave master’s chain! These were my musings.

In my head, I called to question the hike judgment-call juxtaposing it with promises we heard during the electioneering last year. The two didn’t jell! My mind thus became a battle field over what was happening 5,000 miles away from where I live. Then, I came to myself; immediately, retrieving caution from where my initial instinct had made me throw it. This subject must be approached charily and with prudence.

Yes, Nigerians are hurting. One hundred and twenty million people are in poverty. Twenty three states can’t pay workers’ salaries. The economy is at a standstill. Infrastructure are fractured.  Many from whom others used to beg have become beggars themselves. The sick are dying; and the dead can’t be accorded a befitting burial.  Money is scarce and honey is rare to come by. Nigeria’s present is flailing; and hope for the future is failing. These are all facts. But, how did we get here?

I hate discussing crude oil. Too many crude things have historically happened in Nigeria and to Nigerians through crude oil. Those whose regions churn out the milk have daily testaments of woes. Many in the business of crude oil are smug weasels. They are conveniently crude in character.  For about 60 years, Nigeria has been maintained and sustained upon dodgy wings of crude oil. The Nigerian crude oil and its management Mafioso-style crudity have crushed the nation’s economy.

I am not an economist, but I have commonsense. And like a thoroughbred journalist, I shovelled up all pertinent and relevant information around crude oil to the best of my ability. In this treatise, I will not make the N145 price hike discussion too professorial or scholastic. Let’s make it simple and straightforward so that we all know where we are as a nation; and where we are heading as a people.

It is now common knowledge that the existence of subsidies in any form for the Premium Motor Spirit has been a drainpipe glued to the nation’s economy. For many years, we splurged money we should have saved up for the rainy day. The funds instead became an umbrella of thievery for the greedy and grabby. Subsidy has always been both a diversionary blustering and uncanny cacophony designed only to pad up the pockets of cabals who have fed fat from it for many years. What the government ought to have used to fulfil its statutory functions has always found its ways through beastly beaks of human vultures and down through gauntlets that lead into their insatiable guts.

The last PMS price of N86.50 gives an estimate subsidy claim of N13.7 per litre.  This translates to N16.4bn monthly to feed and fan the lifestyles of a few who are destroying Nigeria. In 2015 alone, N1tn was paid in subsidies. The Buhari administration stopped the craziness in January this year.

Nigeria produces 2.2 million barrels of oil per day. With vehement vandalism to oil infrastructure and unrelenting insurgency in the Niger Delta, supply now hovers around 1.4 million barrels per day. When importers of refined fuel ran into a hitch with securing foreign exchange for their trades, the burden shifted on the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation which now upped daily consumption supply to around 90 per cent as against its standard 55 per cent. The systemic queues at filling stations all over the nation were triggered because fuel product could no longer be supplied at the price of N86.50. If this trend continues for another year, Nigeria’s economy will become as chaff; and the nation will slide into a worse economic crisis and chaos than what we experience today. Militants and their sponsors bombing pipelines may be rejoicing, but it’s their own inheritance, with their own hands, that they are lighting up in a bonfire. That’s the summary of where we are.

What then does a country do with this grim picture? Do we allow the verified corrupt practices of subsidy to continue? Does the government fold its frail arms and let the ship run into a wreck? Friends, this is nothing but war against those few grabby gluttons who have declared war against 170 million Nigerians. To every declared war, there must be a decisive response. It is always the call of the leader on whose desk the buck stops.

President Theodore Roosevelt delivered a speech to the America people in April 1942 when the Japanese were advancing across the Pacific to strike one more time at the US. Five months before then, Japan had launched a severe two-hour attack on Pearl Harbour. America was then dragged into World War II.  Roosevelt told the American people to be prepared to make sacrifices for the war effort. They concurred; and America prevailed. Sacrifice is not pleasurable, it is painful. It is not a leisure; it is a languish. My friends, sacrifice is not honeymoon; but those who desire honey must be ready to boldly travel down Sacrifice Boulevard. The N145 price hike is only asking Nigerians that it’s time to recuse ourselves from a lifestyle of lies and self-deception which we have been led to live by wimpy leaders who cannot grab the bull by the horns and make tough decisions that will  make smooth rough roads. Nigeria is broke!

Over these many decades, opportunities that came to us to stave off future financial troubles were squandered through waste and profligacy. Billions are missing here, trillions disappearing into private pockets there. With audacity, thieving leaders displayed their wealth before an angry and hungry people. Through policies and their execution or lack of it, we have robbed ourselves; we have pillaged ourselves, and we have raped ourselves. Sheepishly, some still have an expectation that the act of squandering can still keep a country in affluence! How, may I ask?  Welcome to the world of reality as we bid bye-bye to residing in  a planet of illusion and fantasy.

It is a shame on those who railed against this move in the past but applaud it now.  It’s a shame on those politicians who for the sake of politics rallied around subsidy when they knew it would not augur well for our economic future.  It’s a shame on the leaders of the NLC who are rallying men and women to picket against common sense, and misleading them that the tumour of economic downturn will remain benign without a possibility of it growing malignant and metastasising.

The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu, has assured us that this new move will create 200,000 jobs and save 400,000 that may have been lost if the status quo had been maintained.  I do not have a reason not to believe him.  With the character of President Muhammadu Buhari leading today, saved funds will not be diverted; and monies set aside for specific projects will be disbursed appropriately. Whoever does otherwise in this dispensation will be cooling off his heels in a calaboose for a long time.

A recent World Bank study shows that Nigeria needs about US$ 14.2bn per year to bridge the infrastructure gap, with about $10.5bn needed for federal infrastructure alone.  Nigeria faces a large infrastructure deficit. The inadequacy is holding back economic growth by at least two per cent per annum. Absence of adequate infrastructure adds a massive 16 per cent to business costs. Where will the money saved from subsidies go? We all hope it will help fill many gaping holes of deficiency in the economy. Has Nigeria just been rescued from suicide? I am beginning to think so.