WE are strongly opposed to the spending of the $800 million World Bank petrol subsidy removal palliative loan by the outgoing Muhammadu Buhari regime. No credible argument can support the squandering of this gargantuan fund by a regime that has less than three weeks to vacate power.
What we expect President Buhari and his officials to be doing is clearing their desks and making arrangements to vacate their official quarters for the incoming government.
We expect them to concentrate on preparations for the handover and inauguration of the next president and National Assembly. We do not expect them to engage in any major new initiatives, particularly money-guzzling ones.
The rush to engage in large-scale spending smacks of last-minute looting of the public treasury, even if that is not actually the case. The petroleum subsidy issue is an area in which we can confidently mark the Buhari regime a failure, precisely because of the roles the president has played before and during his past eight years in power.
For instance, Buhari and his party, the defunct Congress for Progressive Change, CPC, supported the nationwide protests organised and funded to frustrate the President Goodluck Jonathan regime’s intention to remove the petrol subsidy in January 2012.
They called it a scam, because there was no subsidy. They claimed that the policy was designed to siphon public funds. Jonathan was forced to drop the idea. If the subsidy removal had been implemented then, we would have forgotten all about it by now. Unfortunately, the country has spent over N12 trillion in subsidy payments.
Last year alone, Nigeria paid through the nose in petrol subsidies (which the government calls “under recovery” to the tune of N3.3 trillion.
Also, a sum of N3.6 trillion was set aside for the same project between January and June 2023.
Coming from a government led by a president who has never renounced his claim that subsidies were nonexistent, we find it very brassy and obdurate. The Buhari regime has been forced to postpone the census it had earlier proposed for April 2023. It has also agreed to leave the question of subsidy removal for the next regime to decide. Having done that, it is only sensible and logical to also leave the World Bank loan on subsidy palliatives to the next administration to implement.
We have very little confidence in the regime’s Social Investment Programmes, SIPs, because they do not provide transparent and credible criteria for determining the eligibility of the beneficiaries of government palliatives or cash transfers.
We don’t support the sharing of public cash, as it is prone to corruption.
We believe the $800 million should be spent on matters that will benefit the entire citizenry, not a few people handpicked with nebulous criteria. Buhari’s public fund spending moments are over.
It is strictly transition time.
[Vanguard]