Senator Adegbenga Kaka
As the controversy generated by the planned removal of oil subsidy rages, the Federal Government has been accused of insincerity with Nigerians. A legislator, representing Ogun East in the National Assembly, Senator Adegbenga Kaka, said this in Abeokuta yesterday during an interaction with journalists.
The lawmaker also challenged the Federal Government to expose the beneficiaries of the oil subsidy before the debate on the issue. Kaka, who noted that there was no subsidy to be removed, also challenged the government to tell Nigerians why N240bn must be appropriated in this years budget while about N1.3trn had been spent without approval from the National Assembly.
He said: The question we have asked the people: who is subsidising who? Is it the Federal Government that is subsidising the poor masses or the poor masses that is being made to subsidise the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of government? A situation whereby we have four refineries and none is working up to 40 per cent capacity utilisation to the extent that we have to carry crude in a dubious manner from this country to a foreign land to refine with the attendant cost of shipment, cost of freight, cost of insurance, and other handling charges and at the same time incur the same expenses to bring it back to this country and those inefficiencies people are now calling it subsidy. Kaka, a former deputy governor of Ogun State under the Osoba administration, however, urged the Federal Government to stop fooling Nigerians, adding that there is no subsidy and you dont build something on nothing and expect it to stand. He also faulted the move to reintroduce toll plazas, stating that toll gates should not be brought back until all roads were motorable.
Describing the move as putting the cart before the horse, Kaka said that Nigerian roads were recently ranked as second to the last in terms of the bad state, precisely it was ranked 191 out of 192 countries in the world. I want to disagree; there must be no toll gate. Toll gates world over are meant for motorists to pay for services being rendered and in the process, what they are paying is not for consumption and embezzlement, its meant for maintenance and repairs from time to time so that people will have value for their money.
On the spate of bombings in the country, attributed to the Boko Haram religious sect, the senator disclosed that the National Assembly had summoned security chiefs on the matter, adding that useful discussions on how best to tackle the menace had been reached. According to Kaka, What we are witnessing, whether you call it Boko Haram, militancy or whatsoever is our collective failure as a nation; failure by the leadership, failure by the politicians, failure by the civil servants and even the clerics, we are all guilty. The lawmaker, who attributed the insecurity to unemployment, hunger and poverty, advised the Federal Government to use the billions of naira voted for security to generate employment.
So, if we are really serious, rather than spending billions to give to security agencies that are going to continue using it for other things rather than security, we should conserve our money and use it to generate employment opportunities and create wealth and put food on the table of the downtrodden. Im sure the restlessness will be curtailed to a large extent. It requires a lot of money for anybody to set up a suicide bomber. Definitely, there are financiers of these activities who are just using the poverty stricken individuals as canon folders. We should be able to identify those characters, name them and bring them to justice.
He also advised government to identify those that were aggrieved, dialogue with them and punish those that were criminally inclined. Meanwhile, a former member of the House of Representatives, Alhaji Saidu Gumburawa, has urged the National Assembly members to resist the Federal Government attempt to remove the subsidy on petroleum. But Senator Jibril Aminu, threw his weight behind the removal. Gumburawa told the News Agency of Nigeria, NAN, in Gumburawa, near Sokoto on Wednesday that they should do what the majority of Nigerians want as their elected representatives.
The removal of the subsidy will worsen the present socio-economic predicament of Nigerians. The removal of the subsidy is also capable of leading to the increment in transport fares, which will inevitably have a multiplier effect on the prices of goods and services all over the nation, he said. Gumburawa, who represented Kware /Wamakko Federal Constituency between 2007 and 2011 and a former board member of NAN, urged the legislators to stop the move. On the new minimum wage, the former legislator said that all the three tiers of government had the wherewithal to implement it.
As far as I am concerned N18,000 is a far cry considering the current endemic super inflation but let them even implement it to the letter and urgently alleviate the suffering of the workers, he said. Gumburawa, who also decried the rising cases of insecurity in the country, urged the various security agencies to be more diligent in the discharge of their duties. In another development, former Minister of Petroleum Resources, Sen. Jibril Aminu, in an interview, threw his weight behind President Goodluck Jonathans move to remove the contentious fuel subsidy. He said only Nigerias neighbours enjoyed the more than N1trn being spent annually by the government in executing the policy.
Aminu, also a former Minister of Education, said the country could not sustain the huge expenditure for too long as very few Nigerians enjoyed the subsidy while the masses of neighbouring countries fed fat on the policy. He said: I am not going to mince words, honestly speaking, the subsidy is too much. Subsidy is just being used to convey these petroleum products to our neighbouring countries.
How much is it costing the country? When I was the Petroleum Minister, it used to cost about N100 million to convey the subsidy, not even the subsidy itself, but to deliver it. When you look at it, it is not something that we can sustain and I believe that NNPC has a responsibility to bring the figures out now and let Nigerians know what we are losing by way of this subsidy, he said. The former minister noted that government position over the years had been misunderstood because of the method used in conveying it to the public.
Meanwhile, Prof. Alaba Ogunsanwo, a lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Lead City University, Ibadan, says the planned removal of subsidy on petroleum is the price the nation must pay for years of economic mismanagement. We have derailed economically for long and the consequence is what we are experiencing today, Ogunsanwo told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Ibadan on Wednesday. Ogunsanwo blamed successive administrations for the nations current economic problems, noting that a differential price regime was obtainable for petroleum products at independence.
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