A former Bauchi State Governor, Isa Yuguda, speaks on the petrol subsidy removal policy of the President Bola Tinubu administration. He was a guest on Channels Television’s Politics Today programme during the week.
According to him, the Federal Government still pays subsidy on petrol, though minimal. The ex-governor said a complete removal will inflict untold hardship on Nigerians, even as he urged states to judiciously make use of the double allocations that they now get by channeling it to drive down the cost of products in the economy.
According to him, as a member of the Presidential Committee on Economic Meltdown in 2008, 2009, he chaired the committee on investigating the subsidy regime. To the best of his understanding, the removal itself was a decision of our representatives in the National Assembly because they prepared the 2023 budget and they did not provide for subsidy post 29th May 2023.
He added that if the budget of 2023 did not include a provision for the entire subsidy, including the one that has been removed, then it’s not a new thing. For everybody that reads the budget, Nigerians would have understood that there was no provision for a certain percentage of the subsidy post May 29th.
He said what the President did was not news, it was something that was already there and he had to bite the bullet to announce it. So, you can’t say that he actually removed the subsidy; the subsidy was removed by the budget of 2003, it was a law.
Credit: channelstv.com
