Former President Olusegun Obasanjo disclosed that the fuel subsidy, which the Federal Government removed in 2023, has been reintroduced due to inflation.
During his inaugural address on May 29, 2023, President Bola Tinubu had declared that the fuel subsidy “is gone.”
This development has caused petrol prices to surge from around N200 to over N600 per liter.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Obasanjo criticized the government’s approach to removing the subsidy.
According to him, the government should have implemented some measures before the subsidy removal.
He, however, explained that the subsidy has “come back” due to the inflation rate.
“There’s a lot of work that needs to be done. Not just wake up one morning and say you removed the subsidy. Because of inflation, the subsidy that we have removed is not gone. It has come back,” Obasanjo said.
He also highlighted the need for investor confidence in Nigeria, stating, “You have to go from a transactional economy to a transformational economy.”
Some of the demands of the ongoing nationwide protest is reinstatement of the fuel subsidy regime.
But Tinubu, in his Sunday broadcast, ruled out the possibility of returning fuel subsidy.
He described the decision to remove the fuel subsidy as painful but necessary, while arguing that it had been a “noose around the economic jugular of our Nation” and had hindered economic development and progress.
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