The Pan-Yoruba sociopolitical organisation, Afenifere, has told President Bola Tinubu that he made a fatal mistake when he removed petrol subsidy.
Afenifere, in a statement by its Publicity Secretary, Prince Justice Faloye, stated this in response to Tinubu’s statement that Nigeria would have been bankrupt if he had not embarked on some economic reforms.
The President while receiving a delegation of former National Assembly colleagues from the aborted Third Republic, during which he served as a Senator representing Lagos West, said, “For 50 years, Nigeria was spending money of generations yet unborn and servicing the West coast of our subregion with fuel. It was getting difficult to plan for our children’s future.
“We faced serious headwinds when I took over, very challenging times. Nigeria would have been bankrupt if we had not taken the actions that we took, and we had to prevent the economy’s collapse.”
According to Afenifere, the economic down turn were self-induced because the Tinubu’s administration made fatal mistakes of removing subsidies before letting the Dangote Refinery come into operation as promised in his own manifesto.
According to the faction of Afenifere loyal to HRH Oba Oladipo Olaitan who took over as leader after the demise of Pa Ayo Adebanjo, fuel subsidy and the floating of naira by Tinubu were responsible for the inflationary spike experienced in the last two years.
Afenifere said the issues should not be politicised but save the nation from “stifling poverty that is wrecking the nation at its seams with increased kidnappings, robberies and other economic crimes.”
“The political class must realize that we are sitting on a gunpowder keg that will explode when the poor can’t take it any longer. A stitch in time saves nine,” the group said.
According to the statement, Tinubu was wrong to have “ floated the Naira when we were still importing fuel that made up one third of our import bill.”
“These two ill-timed policies have cost millions their lives and livelihoods, so inflation rates, and not food prices decreasing, is medicine after death caused by criminal negligence of the government,” he said.
The group countered Tinubu’s reference to 50 years of economic decline “can be traced to when subsidy removal started in the Seventies, which have regressively pushed us into poverty, and accused the president of having presided over the worst of policy of petroleum subsidy removal.
“The problem has been anti-people economic policies. We are nowhere near El Dorado than we were in 1978 when education subsidies were removed and he has placed our education on student loans.
“Fuel prices and other import costs could fall further if the amount saved from fuel subsidies is pumped into the forex market as done since January with $8b although the ill-timed subsidy cut appears to have killed the golden goose and we can never fully regain the true value of our currency due to economic mismanagement.
“Moreover, we should concentrate on creating true wealth and value instead of focusing on indices. Unfortunately, the administration is still in the dark on how to improve the living standards of Nigerians. Ideologically clueless on how to stimulate our consumer nor producer markets to create wealth.
“For example, houses are the root of the consumer markets, the ultimate good for the consumer. Unfortunately Nigeria has twenty million homeless people, the most in the world, yet only 20,000 houses were budgeted for in the 2025 budget, at which rate it will take 1,000 years to resolve our homelessness problem, assuming there is no increase in population. The government needs to budget for 20,000 a day like China and India, or at least 10,000 homes, to make any difference,” the statement said.
