“As Nigerians gathered with family and friends to celebrate the New Year, the federal government was baking a national cake wrapped in the scheme that would instantly make the New Year a bitter one. Barely had the public weaned itself from last year when government dropped a historic surprise on an unsuspecting nation. PPPRA issued a statement abolishing the fuel subsidy. By this sly piece of paper, the federal government breached the social contract with the people.
“By taking this step, government has tossed the people into the depths of the midnight sea. Government demands the people swim to safety under their own power, claiming the attendant hardship will build character and add efficiency to the national economy. It is easy to make these claims when one is dry and on shore. Government would have us believe that every hardship it manufactures for the people to endure is a good thing. This is a lie. The hardships they thrust upon the poor often bear no other purpose than to keep them poor.
“I am not calling President Jonathan an evil man. I do not believe he is perverse. However, the economic ideas controlling him are so misguided and that they have a perverse impact. Because he is slave to wrong-headed economics, the people will become enslaved to greater misery. This crisis will bear his name and will be his legacy. The people now pay a steep tax for voting him into office. The removal of the subsidy is the Jonathan tax. This situation shows that ideas count more than personalities. People may occupy office but how that person performs depends on the ideas that occupy his mind.
“Though someday, Nigeria will have to remove the subsidy the time to do it is not now. This subsidy removal is ill-timed and violates the condition precedent necessary before such a decision is made. First, government needs to clean up and throw away the salad of corruption in the NNPC. Then proceed to lay the foundation for a mass transit system in the railways and road network with long term bonds and fully develop the energy sector towards revitalising Nigeria’s economy and easing the burden any subsidy removal may have on the people.”
Excerpts from ‘Removal of oil Subsidy: President Jonathan breaks social contract with the people’ by President Bola Tinubu’ in a syndicated article, January 2012).
