AZU ISHIEKWENE FROM PREMIUM TIMES
The immediate fallout of Tinubu’s announcement would be messy, even ugly, with spikes in general price levels.
Petrol subsidy is gone, means petrol subsidy is gone. Anything short of saying so on day one, would have amounted to kicking the can down the road, again. And that, we have seen, has been the graveyard of speeches in the last several decades full of economic philosophy and poetry but meaning nothing. Enough.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is under fire for announcing that petrol subsidy is gone from day one. His inauguration address also touched on a unified currency exchange, high interest rate and power, among others.
Of all these, however, the one that got the headlines was petrol subsidy and the most frequently expressed concern, is why now?
To say, in his first speech, that fuel subsidy was gone, that a unified exchange rate was vital, and that the current interest rate was anti-people and anti-business, was the economic equivalent of an earthquake.
Of the four preceding presidential inauguration speeches since 1999 from Olusegun Obasanjo to Buhari, none that I reviewed was nearly as audacious and as provokingly clear as Tinubu’s position was on perhaps the most crucial economic decisions as he took office.
Obasanjo, for example, talked about corruption, loss of confidence in government and the Niger Delta crisis. His three successors spoke about infrastructure, corruption and unemployment. But none was bang on the nail, as frontal and clear, as Tinubu’s was. We’re struggling because we’re used to being lied to.
Interestingly, in campaigns before the last general election, the other leading presidential candidates – Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Peter Obi of Labour Party – said they would remove subsidy. Obi, in fact, called it an “organised crime” and he was right.
For a man who has his work cut out for him, Tinubu does not have the luxury of philosophy or poetry. Not when organised criminals trading on a yearly petrol subsidy of about N4.4 trillion as of 2022, have left the country bleeding nearly to death. He had to make his own structural earthquake or risk uncontrolled seismic explosion. If not now, then when?
Tinubu’s dilemma reminds me of the story of a number of leaders confronted with extremely difficult choices before they had time to settle in office. The first of them is the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who told his story eloquently in his autobiography, Bibi: My story.
Israel might have had some important military successes before, but at the time Netanyahu became prime minister in 1996, the country was an economic basket case and inflation was in double digits.
Netanyahu ran for and won the premiership against his father’s advice, against principalities in his own Likud Party and against veterans in the ruling Labour Party. Winning was hard, but making his victory count was even harder. The press and the unions hated him and didn’t hide it.
As he rolled up his sleeves, he was shocked at what he found when he entered the cabinet room for his first meeting. The room was like a banquet hall, lined with omelettes, cheese, assorted bread, tomatoes, cucumber, jam, cookies and so on.
Since Tinubu said on Monday that petrol subsidy was gone, he has been criticised for a speech “lacking in empathy and philosophy.” If the current subsidy regime would officially end on 30 June, why did he make an obviously unpopular decision on his first day on the job without first laying out how it was going to work?
“The cabinet ministers were already busy…
