Minister of Interior, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, has said President Bola Tinubu could not have continued with petrol subsidy payments because there was no budgetary allocation for it when his administration assumed office.
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Speaking on Monday during a panel session at the ongoing Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) annual conference in Enugu, where he shared the stage with former Minister of Education, Oby Ezekwesili, Tunji-Ojo explained that paying subsidy without appropriation would have been unlawful.
“As of the time this administration came on board, there was no provision for subsidy in the national budget. Paying for subsidy would have been illegal because it was not budgeted for. We have accumulated wrong choices made over the years that are being corrected. So, we need to take out emotion and look at the facts of where we were coming from and where we are now,” he said.
President Tinubu had, in his May 29, 2023 inaugural address, declared that “fuel subsidy is gone,” a pronouncement that immediately triggered a sharp increase in prices of goods and services across the country.
Reacting at the NBA conference, Ezekwesili criticised the decision, saying it lacked careful planning.
“When we train in economic policy, you really have to prepare for reforms. I think that there was a braggadocio that was behind that whole ‘subsidy is gone’. That reform was not prepared for. So what we ended up in that situation was a good reform done in the wrong way. And because that good reform was done in the wrong way, it signalled to every other economic type of decisions that citizens had to make, and it threw the economy into the inflationary situation that we have found,” she said.
But Tunji-Ojo insisted the decision was inevitable, stressing that Nigeria had been spending about $25 billion annually on subsidies — an expenditure he described as unsustainable.
“We were busy spending money that we did not have. When a man has a tumour, it is not Panadol that is prescribed. Surgery may be the solution. The economy is not stupid, but our choices over the years have been stupid,” he said.
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