Tinubu knew Buhari’s rhetoric about lowering fuel prices was hogwash. But being a scam artist — a “master strategist,” in the all-is-fair-in-politics sense of grab, snatch, and run — he latched onto it anyway, using the populist Buhari as his ladder into power.
Once in office, he executed a double-whammy policy reversal: removing fuel subsidies and floating the naira, devaluing the currency by nearly 300%. This created an illusion of “more money everywhere,” concealing the reality of lost purchasing power and the continued looting of national resources. For the people, it has been sorrow, pain, and tears.
At a moment when the real question should be who can better manage the resources we’ve saved from no longer importing refined fuel — thanks to the Dangote Refinery — and use them to build the country, another impressionist has resurfaced Buhari’s old rhetoric of subsidized fuel, deceiving people into believing the economy’s problems can be solved by simply lowering the pump price. He even calls it their entitlement.
This new proposal — which I doubt will ever see the light of day — is designed to shift the debate away from accountability for government revenue and toward lamentations over why fuel prices haven’t “magically” dropped since the subsidy was removed.
This new scam artist would then have a ready-made excuse for poor fiscal performance: revenue falling short of what it was under the previous government.
What he won’t tell Nigerians is that any significant drop in national revenue brings us face to face with loan defaults — and the bitter pill of sovereign bankruptcy all over again. We’d find ourselves under the financial control of our creditors, and conditions in the country then would be better imagined than experienced.
Meanwhile, Atiku would be recuperating in a hospital bed in Dubai, while his cronies have a field day looting the economy through multiple fake agencies — something we’ve already seen glimpses of.
Maybe we simply don’t love ourselves enough.
Published by Chuks Nwachuku
