When the President took over, that year’s budget allocated 97 per cent of our revenue to service debt. So if you’re spending 97 per cent on debt servicing, how much is left? So the government before President Tinubu was borrowing money for recurrent expenditure. Less than N1tn was devoted to capital projects. Nigeria was haemorrhaging heavily.
We also owed the NNPC close to N4tn on subsidy financing. NNPC was the only importer. Other companies were not ready to import because the price was not right. Then, if you look at the exchange, we have multiple windows of exchange, which international agencies such as the World Bank have advised us to address. So, you will find a situation whereby some people close to the former CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, were collecting money at the official rate and then offloading it in the parallel market and making a humongous profit for doing nothing.
Before Tinubu took over, the government had sold our future by mortgaging our oil to take loans. And oil is our major revenue earner. If you are selling about 40 to 45 per cent of whatever you produce, then you wonder why the inflow from NNPC was drying up. So for years, NNPC was not paying money into the government coffers because we were spending money to take care of the subsidies and so on. It is still affecting us because we’ve already pledged our oil to collect loans all over the place.
So this is the situation that President Bola Tinubu met. Things were bad. Nigeria was bleeding. And it was his duty to stop that bleeding.
From day one, he announced at Eagle Square that “subsidy is gone”. He was not the originator of the abrogation of subsidy. The Buhari government had already put the machinery in place to end fuel subsidy by the end of June. Of course, the nation was already reeling from petrol scarcity and so on. It was thus necessary that the President fast forward the end of subsidy to May instead of June. Four weeks or more would have been very calamitous for this nation’s economy. There would have been no fuel to run the economy.
