Over 150 civil society and non-governmental organisations under the aegis of Coalition of Northern Groups (CNG), have risen from a town meeting in Kaduna to back President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on fuel subsidy removal.
The groups lampooned former President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration for allegedly pursuing unpopular deregulation programmes while maintaining the “fraudulent subsidy regime and further plunging the nation into deeper crisis and mass suffering”.
The group said the $15.6 billion spent annually on subsidy could build railway from Lagos to Kano, Port-Harcourt to Maiduguri and Lagos to Calabar combined and Wembley-like stadiums in each of Nigeria’s six geo-political zones.
Reading a communiqué issued at the end of a one-day town hall meeting, chairman of the Communiqué Drafting Committee and spokesman of CNG, Abdul-Azeez Suleiman said, N2.91 trillion spent by the federal government on petrol subsidy between January and September 2022, was largely responsible for the country’s dwindling public finances.
He said available data showed the unforgivable level of corruption perpetrated with the subsidy regime in favour of a few individuals at the expense of public projects that could have benefitted the people.
In his words: “President Bola Tinubu disclosed that the current budget handed over to him by former President Buhari did not provide for the petrol subsidy and therefore it is gone, which did not go down well with the exploiter class that benefits from the subsidy budgets. Since Tinubu’s announcement of the removal of the fuel subsidy, the cartel that has been reaping its benefits at the expense of the suffering masses, has waged a campaign about the fictitious knock-on effects that it will have on the daily lives of Nigerians.”
The groups called on Nigerians to ignore the damaging propaganda campaigns by the ‘merciless cartels’ that have impoverished the nation while pocketing the subsidy proceeds for their personal benefits. It urged President Tinubu to dispassionately look into the current price pegged at N540 per litre by the NNPCL and bring it much lower immediately.