KEY POINTS
- Dogara points out that the removal of subsidy was done long before Tinubu administration came into power.
- The previous financial year’s budget did not include money for subsidies.
- Dogara was therefore using the forum to seek better way forward on the fallout of the subsidy regime.
The former Speaker of the House of Representatives Yakubu Dogara has therefore made it clear that the president Bola Tinubu did not initiate the removal of the petrol subsidy despite first announcing it. Dogara stated that the subsidy had actually been effectively stripped down to some form of efficacy before Tinubu’s governorship as there was no line funding for its payment in the Nigerian budget before the 2023 election budget proposed by the National Assembly.
Dogara, while speaking on Friday while responding to Tinubu’s allegation in an interview with Channels TV, said there was no provision for subsidy in the budget in the first instance as the PDP claimed. He has stressed that, to his understanding, it was the president who made the public announcement of the plan for the removal of subsidies, but the policy had been prepared before his coming into office.
The status of removal of subsidies
According to Dogara, while the removal of subsidy was right for the growth of the country it has not been good on the Nigerian populace. He also pointed out that these are the issues which need more efforts on the solutions rather than using the platform to publicize the issues.
The president did not suspend it as some people are saying; in that budget, there was no provision for subsidy at all. The fact of the matter was that the subsidy was removed well before he ever came to office,” Dogara said.
Addressing misconceptions
Subsidy payments were difficult owing to absence of provisions in the budget Therefore, regarding general perception that President Tinubu was behind the removal, Dogara responded that there was no cash to pay the subsidy. ”The budget is provided for in the constitution, and if there is no constitutional provision for something, you cannot fund it,” he said.
According to The Punch, the initiatives to fully eliminate petrol subsidy are based on Tinubu’s speech on the inauguration day of May 29, 2023, which promised that only the PDP will subsidize petrol from June 2023, when there is no stop-gap funding in the federal budget.
