The chickens are finally coming home to roost

By 2011, it was already clear to all discerning Nigerians that the age-long policy of government to provide subsidy on petrol was anachronistic and even criminal and needed to be scrapped. Then, the price of petrol was being subsidised by more than 54.4%.  Since the four local refineries – with a combined installed production capacity of 445, 000 barrels of fuel per day – were not functioning, about 92 percent of Nigeria’s fuel consumption was being imported.  The cost was colossal. In 2011 alone, the cost of subsidising petrol was about $8 billion, representing 30% of the Nigerian government’s expenditure, about 4% of GDP and 118% of the capital budget. In comparison, Nigeria’s education budget for 2011 was $2.2 billion, Meanwhile, education budget was $2.2 billion, that of health – $1.32 billion and works/roads $680 million.

This was sheer madness and even criminal. Besides wasting such humongous public funds on the consumption of a commodity that most users would afford while neglecting investments in critical national infrastructure and human capital, the subsidy regime subsidized and exported jobs to other countries that refined the petrol and most importantly encouraged and fed corruption in Nigeria as most of the subsidy funds are stolen by the administrators and fuel marketers who, in any case, still do not sell the fuel at the government approved price beyond the cities of Lagos and Abuja. It was clear to me then that Nigeria could not make any progress with the subsidy regime still in place.

The decision of the Jonathan regime to end the programme was therefore the best decision any sensible government could have taken at that time. But alas, labour unions, student groups and the civil society, who had developed an unhealthy sense of entitlement to cheap fuel, opposed the move. However, much more unfortunate was the decision of opposition politicians to place politics above national interest and vigorously resist the removal of the subsidy on petrol. General Buhari, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Babatunde Fashola, Pat Utomi – and indeed, anyone that was not aligned with the then ruling party, the PDP, opposed the move. General Buhari was the most ridiculous of them all. In a video that was widely circulated on social media, he denied the existence of subsidy altogether labelling the whole scheme as a fraud. Then, it appeared to me that their aim was just to cash in on the opportunity to paint the government black and get it removed. But I could be wrong and I gave them the benefit of the doubt. I therefore watched helplessly as Nigerians were mobilised to protest against their true and real interests.

Later that year as a graduate student in Oxford University, I decided to write my dissertation on the subsidy strikes and protests of that year. In March 2013, I spent a month interviewing some of the main actors of the protests and strike in Lagos and Abuja and that was when my eyes were finally opened to the forces at play. I realised that so many divergent interests were at play during the protests/strike. The first and obvious was the labour unions who were firmly opposed to the deregulation of the downstream sector because it will adversely affect their members and greatly reduce their powers. Another reason also was that the leadership of the labour unions had built their reputation and popularity around leading strikes against increase in the pump price of petrol and they fear the removal of subsidy will remove that means through which some labour leaders have used to ascend the political ladder.

Civil societies and youth groups, on their part, were mainly concerned about the escalating cases of corruption in the country and absence of government accountability. They seem to erroneously believe that once the corruption was tackled and government became transparent, the subsidy could be well managed to benefit all Nigerians. Then there were the opposition politicians who were angry with the Jonathan regime and whose primary purpose was to use the crisis to engineer a revolution that will bring down the government.  They were the silent mobilisers and sponsors of the more militant youth groups and were the most disappointed when the labour unions cut a deal with the government to suspend the strike.

As keen watchers of Nigerian politics will attest to, the protests of 2012 sounded the first death knell of the Jonathan regime. Today, the opposition politicians that mobilised Nigerians against the Jonathan regime and fuelled the protests against the removal of subsidy are in power and now have to deal with the difficult issue of the removal of the subsidy on petrol. Hardly had they come to power than virtually all of them made a volte face and began to admit that truly, the subsidy regime was unsustainable. They now face the difficult task of convincing the people that removal of subsidy was indeed in their best interest. The chickens are finally coming home to roost!

For the people who believed all the propaganda of the politicians then, it is becoming clear that they had been sold another lie. Nothing captures this reality more than the music of Femi Kuti titled: Dem Bobo!

 

Christopher Akor