The nonsense about the prebendal Nigerian state subsidizing fuel price started in April 1992 when the dictatorship of Ibrahim Babangida revved up the price of a liter of fuel from 15.3 kobo to 20kobo. He was to do it again on March 31 1986, when he increased the price from 20k to 39.5k, on April 10 1988, from 39.5k to 42k. On January 1, 1998, it increased the price from 42k to 60k (although the regime said it is for private vehicles only, as it said the price remained 42k for commercial vehicles).  On December 19, 1989, it moved to a uniform price of 60k. On March6, 1991, the price of a liter of fuel was increased from 60k to 70k and that was the price regime before the regime was chased out of power in August 1993.

The stop gap regime of Ernest Shonekan was to employ this devious policy to increase the price of a liter of fuel from 70k to N5 on November 8, 1993 but after a hectic mass protest, which culminated in the military kick out of the illegitimate regime, the incoming Abacha regime reduced the increment to N3.25 on November 22, 1993. On October 2m 1994, the Abacha junta increased the price of fuel to N15, from N3.25 but after massive street protests, the regime reduced the increment to N11 on October 4, 1994. That was the price till Abacha expired and the Abdulsalami Abubakar care taker junta was to rev up the price from N11 to N25 on December 20 1998 and after days of sustained protests, it was forced to reduce the increment to N20 on January 6, 1999.

The Obasanjo regime adopted this fraud as the cornerstone of its economic policy for no sooner than it was sworn in than it reached for it to effect an increment to N30 on June 1, 2000 but protests and mass rejection forced it to reduce the increment to N25 on June 8, 2000 and further down to N22 on June 13, 2000. The regime was again to increase the price to N26 on January 1, 2002 and again to N40 on June 23, 2003. He was to retch it up to N70 by the time he left in May 2007 but the incoming Yar’Adua regime reduced it to N65, after general protest against the new price regime.

The Yar’Adua regime made efforts to increase the price of petroleum products but could not muster the will to walk through the increasing mass disapproval for such act. The Jonathan presidency was initially more concerned with consolidating its tenuous hold on power after Yar’Adua and winning the incoming presidential race as to tinker with the existing price. But with the regime sworn in for a fresh term, it was not difficult why it is behaving as if its life depends on draining what remains of the life blood of parched and famished Nigerians for whatever he feels he is doing as Nigerian president.

Given the widespread corruption and open trading that attended the last general election, where there is yet no rebuttal to the shocking report that a hefty sum running into hundreds of billions of Naira were released on the eve of the general election, to provoke the kind of bizarre trading of votes we saw in full display at polling centers all over Nigeria, it is obvious that someone must pay and he has to be the ordinary Nigerian.

It is instructive that it was only the Abacha junta, which made concerted efforts to utilize the proceeds from its own increment to do some tangible things. This he did by setting up the Petroleum Trust Fund, which made some credible interventions in some sectors of the polity as it lasted. It is also instructive to note that the PDP government since 1999 has been most proficient in this scam and has demonstrated the worst sense of accountability in managing the proceeds from these increments.

In the last thirteen years, when fuel increment has assumed dizzying heights, we have witnessed the worst atrophy in virtually all sectors of our national life and witnessed the worst act of asset stripping in the life of our country as an independent nation. It says a lot about its freshly rehearsed but over-employed promises of turning our country into an Eldorado with the intended retrieval of the so called subsidy when we know that it is mere peanut compared to the hundreds of billions of dollars that accrue to the nation yearly through oil sales but which are mainly looted by those who have seen a cure-it-all promise in subjecting Nigerians to painful periodic extortions in the name of subsidy removal.

As I had insisted in some previous reports, I am hard put buying this nonsense of fuel subsidy and all what not. If the government is saying Nigerians, majority of whom operate outside government and gain nothing from the trillions of Naira annual budget rituals  that end up being stolen at the end of the day, must be forced to pay for its inefficiency and to keep the mills of its huge corruption complex running, we will understand their stand. If Nigerians must pay for the complete wreck of the nation’s oil industry and its conversion into a haven for pimps and scoundrels that are beholden to the government of the day, we will understand where successive governments are coming from.

These wreckage that is being employed as a tool for mass impoverishment accounts for why Nigeria is the only major leading nation on earth that depends on imported finished fuel products and is the major leading oil producing nation that pays the highest price for fuel (at N65) and the government feels that it is best to continue this policy just because it allows it an unplugged wellhead for looting.


The downstream sector of the country’s oil industry is a racket writ large and the government is a chief patron of this racket. Those that run in might well belong to the most hideous secret cults known to man. The players are the friends, fronts, cahoots and associates of those in government and it is to their interests the government is hell bent on inflicting this latest punishment on pulverized and long suffering Nigerians. It is not in a haste to deal with the racketeers and swindlers that have reduced the country’s oil industry to a scammers’ heaven. It will rather patronize them for they are its friends and business fronts and will rather pass the burden for its own failure on the masses. The Nigerian oil industry is a jungle of sorts; poorly audited, poorly managed and hardly accountable corruption complex where bacchanal stealing and sundry acts of looting take place.

Nigerian yearly oil output is a matter of conjecture and reports says that what is officially reported as sold each year is just a fraction of what is stolen, bunkered or misappropriated unedited. Swathed with legions of bottlenecks and man-made craters, it is not surprising that it has become a deadly cudgel in the hands of successive governments who employ it at will to chastise the people without let.

What is outstanding in this subsidy argument, since it berthed to constantly torment Nigerians, is that it is not backed by any sound arguments, it is not fortified by any believable and verifiable statistics and it is short on the good intentions needed to convince a skeptical citizenry to start putting their faith and trust in government that has consistently excelled in proving it could never be trusted. The government and its supporters, most of whom are heavily induced, have only traded on such cheap reasoning as;
·        Some crooks (who are fronts, business associates and well known friends of government) are the ones collecting the huge money allegedly spent on subsidy so the people must be made to pay.
·        The nation should forget about refineries as government believes that our total local consumption must be imported.
·        The government cannot police our borders through which it says some people ship the fuel meant for Nigerians’ consumption to neighboring countries.
Because of all these advertisement of self incompetence, Nigerians must be milked to assuage the god of corruption, which is fully patronized by those in government.

The reality of the kind of scam this subsidy amounts to remains that it is an open-ended racket that has no ceiling. Because little, apart from the fairy tales of turning the nation into an Eldorado with the proceeds of every subsidy removed, is said or known about the operations of the nation’s oil sector, successive governments have had to force its ways through the sagging wills of the people. It has no starting and closing price and this makes it more dangerous. So whoever thinks that the government would have stopped at any price in its attempt to subsidize its incompetence must be a dreamer. The much we get are convenient statistics that are cooked to advance the rapacious fangs of this policy and further worsen the poverty level in Nigeria. In doing this, these governments are leveraging so much on the weaknesses of the people to control and moderate their leaders’ actions than any apparent conviction it has secured from Nigerian people about the potency of this cure-all panacea. That is what has been sustaining the audacity of our rampaging leaders to visit this scourge on us and care no hoot in the process. They have their eyes trained on the numerous fonts of plundering which the next session in extortion called subsidy removal will open for them and their subalterns.


But we are being milked and sentenced to preventable death by every act of increment. This is the reason Nigerians must resolve to employ the impending increment to settle this issue as well as the many other issues that have ensured our nation remains a malformed cretin after fifty one woeful years of independence. As the government believes the removal of the so called subsidy has all the answers to their problems, the Nigerian masses have the same opportunity to employ the issue to ask why they came to be so bestially violated and seek practical solution to the problem of rapine governance that has slated their heads permanently on the executioner’s slab. We can use the opportunity offered by the impending extortion session to ask why we should continually feed a cult of unfeeling preys to constantly prey on us for their sustenance. I think the gathering tempest over fuel price increment offers Nigerians their best chance to meaningfully address their mounting problems. Let us not waste that golden opportunity!


http://www.elombah.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8433:fuel-subsidy-as-a-cure-all-panacea-to-nigerias-problems&catid=58:peter-claver-opara&Itemid=80

Peter Claver Oparah.
Ikeja, Lagos.
E-mail: peterclaver2000@yahoo.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Stop spamming the board with this your buhari this buhari that talk.The fact that Atiku and ibb killed 3rd term doesn't make them saints,even a mad man on the street knows that subsidy removal is not the best thing for naija.

^ which planet are you living on?


For those of you who want to perpetrate the lie that Nigeria subsidises fuel, I challenge you to show me any annual budget of any government where they have quantified the fuel subsidy?

Also did obasanjo not increase price of fuel by 300% in the name of removing fuel subsidy, should it mean that any subsidy would have been fully removed by Obj and fuel price put into making at least 200% profit by Obasanjos removal of the ficticious subsidy?

Stop portraying buhari like he's better than any other nigerian politicians.They are all thievies !

Shame on the poster. Stop trying to campaign for Buhari.
You're a Youth right? Why are you campaigning for a man who is prolly dealing with Alzheimer's disease or some other old man's disease.

I thought Nigeria belonged to the Youths.

There is no where in d whole article where Buhari is mentioned
The point is Subsidy is a big fraud

The earlier we forget political diff & agree dat dis govt has no political will to solvin our problems, d better

I am dismayed by bluetooth calling Buhari a thief, you might not like the guy but please do not bend the truth, GenBuhari carry on with your campaign, it seems we need to knock it into people's head that is better to listen to corrupt free individuals than the GEJ and co of this world, jeun Soke GenBuhari.

how many time is the same fictitious subsidy going to be removed by successive governments?

Obasanjo started the deceit , he  increased fuel price by 300% in the name of "fuel subsidy" removal, surely once Obasanjo had done that, any subsidy would have been completely removed and would have put government into 200% profit on fuel sales income?

Has anybody ever seen any annual budget where the government had ever accounted for / quanitified this fictiticious "fuel subsidy"?

Of oil fuel exporting countries in the world, Nigeria has the 2nd highest fuel prices , so how can we say that we are subsidising fuel?

People shine your eyes.

We do not have to accept this nonesense and improvishment

This mufugguh sho'nuff has no job to speak of, judging by the way his every wasted day is devoted to churning out convoluted dissertations that nobody ever bothers to read, in praise of genocide instigator Ayatollah Buhari Bin Laden - that truly despicable cretin who will soon answer an invitation from the International Criminal Court in the Hague, over the bloodshed he directed in the wake of his most recent electoral trouncing.

@Jakumo,
What did Buhari do to you?

Was your father one of the 500 corrupt officials/politicians that Buhari imprisoned in January 1984?

@Jakumo
The question GenBuhari askd is worth answering
Name calling will not solve Nig problems
Tell GEJ to wake up!

It is not subsidy removal - it is a fuel tax.

We need to ask ourselves why the deceit?

President Jonathan is even planning to re-introduce Toll Gates (additional fuel tax), even as he plans to hike the price of fuel next year.

GenBuhari:

@Jakumo,
What did Buhari do to you?

Was your father one of the 500 corrupt officials/politicians that Buhari imprisoned in January 1984?

@Jakumo:
Do respond to the above question - stop pretending you have not seen it. BTW, rolling out incoherent grammatical jargon will not help either.

hercules07:

I am dismayed by bluetooth calling Buhari a thief, you might not like the guy but please do not bend the truth, GenBuhari carry on with your campaign, it seems we need to knock it into people's head that is better to listen to corrupt free individuals than the GEJ and co of this world, jeun Soke GenBuhari.

How buhari better than Ibb and Abacha ? Simple !

~Bluetooth:

How buhari better than Ibb and Abacha ? Simple !

Wrong question my dear. E.g: As a security agent, you don't pick someone up in the street and and him to prove how he is not guilty.

If you feel Buhari is corrupt, you should accuse him of a crime - and not to ask "how he is he not corrupt".

~Bluetooth:

How buhari better than Ibb and Abacha ? Simple !

Also, people are innocent until they are proved guilty. And not Guilty until they prove themselves innocent.

Or can you rather see the question like this:
How Jonathan better than Ibb and Abacha ? Simple !

astronp8:

Wrong question my dear. E.g: As a security agent, you don't pick someone up in the street and and him to prove how he is not guilty.

If you feel Buhari is corrupt, you should accuse him of a crime - and not to ask "how he is he not corrupt".

You are now telling me that becasue efcc has not arrest ibb,buhari,danjuma and obj automatically make them corruption-free ?

@~Bluetooth
Funny Nigerian mentality. Answer a question with another question.

Let me teach you:
Always answer a question first and then put forward your own question.

~Bluetooth:

You are now telling me that becasue efcc has not arrest ibb,buhari,danjuma and obj automatically make them corruption-free ?

^^ This is how it goes, if you say one is corrupt, put forward an accusation. Most of the names you mentioned, we have a lot of accusations on them, that EFCC have refused to go after them is rather a failure on EFCC not mine.

So if you think Buhari is corrupt, what are you accusing of?

BTW: Stop avoiding this:

GenBuhari:

@Jakumo,
What did Buhari do to you?

Was your father one of the 500 corrupt officials/politicians that Buhari imprisoned in January 1984?

Im nw convinced that we truely deserve d type of leaders we v in this country. D blame is solely on we d lead n nt d leaders cos we dnt address issues but attack those that comes up with issues. I read dat coment n nvr came accross were d poster was singing buhari's praises rather his coments were purely on d periodic lies bin dished out to u and i by dfrnt goverments on subsidy and increament of petroluem pump prices. I expected a logical counter opinion based on facts to enlighten us all incase d poster was misinforming us but non of d antagonist did that rather d best dey did was to start sayn sturfs about buhari and i began to wonder if the posters coments were so ambigous that some of us cldnt comprehend or is it that some of us cant address issues rationaly anymore without bring up premitive and subjective considerations to practically all national issues. Some1 evn mentioned ibb and atiku killing 3rd term, 4heaven sake hw does dat conect to d issue in question? Nigerians problem is 80% caused by the masses who fail to challenge their oppresors rather they hold brief 4then and evn worship them. Its rly unfortunate

~Bluetooth:

How buhari better than Ibb and Abacha ? Simple !

Ibb/Abacha are far better than Buhari, the latter is the worst since the inception of this union. Apart from the coup January 15 1966 , Buhari is the only Military guy that took power from a democratically elected administration. Military coup is bad enough but coup conducted against a democracy is on a different level on its own, there is no English word to describe that. Consider what Nigeria would be today if democracy endured from that moment. I am not surprised you have people holding the guy to a high esteem - Hitler is regarded as a hero by Neo-Nazi.

Let us not get distracted, Buhari is not the subject of this thread.

This thread is about the fact that our government is deceiving us that they subsidise fuel, as a way to further loot our treasury.

Nigerians how much more can you take?

Hope we are ready for another round of impoverishment.

May be we are waiting until we are dirt poor and are deviod of all self-respect, before we would finally do something to stop these bunch of crooks that have stolen our country.

I wonder how many people would die as a direct result of the hardship that would result from the coming rise in fuel prices and further devaluation of our currency.

If you want to learn about Buhari, check my thread about archived international news stories for the period that Buhari was Head of State.

https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-693700.32.html

^^^^^^^

Learn about Buhari indeed ! !

The thread is actually about Nigeria's history and Buhari of course, was part of it.

https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-693700.32.html

There is no greater expert on the Nigerian Oil industry than Buhari and he says that Nigeria does not subsidise fuel and talk of subsidy removal is nothing but a tool to loot the treasury of the revenue that would be realised from the fuel price hike.

Let them remove d subsidy or iincrease d price if they like, it is the final tonic needed to revolt against d party in power. Subsidy is a scam as only in a twisted country will d producer of corn subsidize maize for his family consumption. WHAT A FRAUD!!!

Thieves in Nigeria hate Buhari. Enemies of nigeria & nigerians hate Buhari. Religious bigots hate Buhari. But time is fast coming when nigerian youths will be unleashed & all d enemies of dis country will have nowhere to run to because everywhere they will find d youths waiting for them to take their pound of flesh. that time is approaching faster than any thief can understand. that time is here!

yeswecan:

Ibb/Abacha are far better than Buhari, the latter is the worst since the inception of this union. Apart from the coup January 15 1966 , Buhari is the only Military guy that took power from a democratically elected administration. Military coup is bad enough but coup conducted against a democracy is on a different level on its own, there is no English word to describe that. Consider what Nigeria would be today if democracy endured from that moment. I am not surprised you have people holding the guy to a high esteem - Hitler is regarded as a hero by Neo-Nazi.

@Bolded:
If Democracy is all good (no matter how the government is destroying its people), Why are you supporting revolution against the current decay we have at hand. Or do you think all is now well?