Fuel Subsidy Removal

I have watched with disgust the way peeps on my contact list have sent several BC messages making a joke of the recent subsidy removal by the Federal Government, this only supports the fact that the state of this Republic of which am not too proud to be a citizen of, is a deplorable one. To be at least sincere, the broadcasts were a sort of comic relief but the truth is, does it really relief us of the hardship that our leaders are subjecting us to, does it really give us the hope for a better life to come in the near future, for me the answer is a NO.

To tell the truth, our government has failed us but we the citizens have failed ourselves even more. We watch despairingly as our leaders loot our treasury and cart away taxpayer’s funds with reckless abandonment and all we do is to tell ourselves that someday things would get better or in some other cases make a joke of it and wait for your turn.

 I was on a trip from Abuja to Akure sometime last year when one of the passengers prayed to God that he should someday get into the helms of power so that he could loot from the treasury that our current leaders loot from. I was quick to tell him that his prayers would not be answered, he was shocked at my sharp response to his prayers but he took his time to explain the frustration he has been through and that the only way he could identify was to join them in the rot. We live in a country where the citizens are not empowered to be financially free, cost and the level of education offered by the government to its citizens is at its ebb, I need not talk about the failure of our government in all of its other sector as we all know that Nigeria is the perfect example of what anyone would call a failed state.

One of the reasons why the fuel subsidy has been removed by the government is because a group of people known to the government and that have been labeled a cabal by this same government is profiting from the fuel subsidy by smuggling through our own very borders to sell into neighboring countries, this brings up this question on my mind, What has happened to arresting them and prosecuting them?

We make a lot of money from the sale of Crude Oil, but we don’t get to enjoy the benefits from the proceeds, we have refineries that don’t work due to the carelessness and the clumsy handling by our leaders, this has driven us to the point of importing refined products from foreign refineries. What has happened to we (Nigeria) bringing up our refineries to full production capacity, what has stopped us from even inviting these foreign refineries to come down to  Nigeria and refine for us if we do not have the intelligence to do that?

 The Minister of Petroleum said at the last Fuel subsidy debate that, "Nigerians must face a level of hardship; we must make sacrifices for this nation to move forward". Have we not faced enough hardship yet, have we not made sacrifices that only the people in power benefit from, she hardly patronizes filling stations, so it might be difficult for her to fully understand what the true form of hardship this inhuman policy would subject the masses to by the margin difference caused by the subsidy removal.

I spent 6 years in the University studying a five year program simply because ASUU would not stop going at loggerheads with the Federal Government and even telling the tales of the quality of education I got due to lack of proper learning infrastructure leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. I would have loved to study in the best schools in the world, but my parent could not afford it because of the huge devaluation that has rocked our dear NAIRA. Yet in the midst of this mess that our leaders have put us into, they still send their kids abroad to get the kind of education that is beyond the reach of the masses they rule and when they come back, they have job slots waiting for them in very juicily placed positions. I graduated from a class of close to 150 students but after school only a few percentage of my class mates were able to secure a good job and please note that this supposed good job rewards us with less than a $1000 per month, we live in a country where it took a lot of negotiation for the Federal Government to increase the minimum wage to a little over $100 per month and still they want us to endure further hardship by increasing the cost of transportation vis-à-vis fuel subsidy removal.

Our healthcare system is in such an abysmal state, the best service that you can get from a community center is wound treatment and even if you are not careful, you would not get the best attention from the quack and inexperienced nurses that would attend to you not even a trained doctor is attached to this comminity centers. Going to a government hospital is not even a better as it would only bring your mind to what the cost of a coffin is, this area like other sectors of the government, our leaders have failed us woefully. The standard of our health facilities is so poor that even our leaders don’t patronize them, from tittle-tattles heard from here and there, it has been gathered that our leaders are entitled to foreign trips for medical checkups as part of the benefits of being in power. They cannot even patronize the government hospitals that they have set up for the citizens to go to and even these citizens cannot afford to even patronize them due to the high level of poverty that has enslaved the average citizen, yet they want us to face more HARDSHIP.

When the average Nigerian wakes up to be self-sustaining and tries to set up a small scale business that would at least give him access to as decent life, the cost of running this business is greatly increased because our government has failed to provide him adequate power to run this business. The profit that would have been gained from this business is consumed by the cost of running generators, yet they want to remove subsidy which would further drive up the cost of maintaining this little business he has put up. Please tell me what this man would tell his kids when the schools resume and he can no longer afford the school fees of his kids, what future lies ahead this kids when they are eventually sent home from school.

Are we supposed to pay for the ineptitude of our leaders, are we supposed to pay the price of corruption in the seat of power, what sacrifice have the people in power made that has made them require this kind of sacrifice from us? All these questions keep running through my mind each time I think about the subsidy removal.

Is it a good thing we go through austere measures to drive our country to the right destination, my answer to this is YES. Do we trust this government to do this, NO.? Do we have the right set of people in power to get this done for us maybe YES but the level of corruption being perpetuated by our corrupt officers would only make work done = 0.

In my own opinion, if they government is serious about fuel subsidy removal, continuous importation of refined crude would only breed a good ground for a state of anarchy in the country. Let us refurbish our moribund refineries and build new ones that would be enough to serve the demand of the population, if this is done, then we have achieved subsidy removal, Federal Government can now sell fuel to independent marketers who would through free market supply fuel to the masses at a price determined by competition.  Anything short of this is a move by the government to further impoverish the average Nigerian.

Let us rise up and kick against the Fuel Subsidy Removal; as rightly said by Edmund Burke, “The only thing required in the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing or fail to speak against it”. He also said, “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion”. The masses have spoken, we don’t want a subsidy removal; we only need the government to correct the errors it has made and not to make us pay for these errors.