The Federal Government has backed down on the removal of fuel subsidy, at least in the interim, even as it plans to merge Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) to save costs, Finance Minister, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, said in Abuja yesterday.

Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala, who also doubles as the Co-ordinating Minister for the Economy, said government had temporarily jettisoned the idea to allow for “wider consultations with stakeholders.” The government, earlier in the year, had indicated its intention to hands-off the payment of subsidy on fuel, notably petrol and kerosene, in a bid to free up funds for capital expenditure in the 2012 budget.

The Presidency had hinged its policy reversal on the huge sums (about N1.4trillion) it was investing in the fuel subsidy regime, and instead pushed for the deregulation of the downstream sector, which meant an end to fuel subsidy and by extension, an increase in the pump prices of the two products.
“The Federal Government has backed down on the removal of subsidy and resorted to wide consultations with faith-based organizations, youth groups and other stakeholders and after that, the government would make a pronouncement on the issue,” Okonjo-Iweala said.

“The President is consulting widely and at the appropriate time, he will take a decision,” she added. Labour had been so fierce in its campaign against the policy, given the untold hardship it would bring on the masses. The Finance Minister, who was giving a breakdown on the budget presented on Tuesday to the National Assembly by President Goodluck Jonathan, had declined to state whether the fuel subsidy removal issue was finally rested or when it would be revisited.

She also disclosed that government had uncovered over N1 billion hitherto enjoyed by police ghost pensioners.
Okonjo-Iweala announced that the Federal Government would restructure and merge some MDAs whose functions are overlapping, with a view to reducing the cost of running government. Already, a committee had been set up to look into ways of merging or restructuring the agencies. Making these disclosures at the budget breakdown in Abuja, the minister said that following the reforms embarked upon by the government, police pension overhead was brought down from N1.5 billion to N.5 billion.

This, she said, was achieved through a biometric data system of payment. The budget whose theme is: “Fiscal consolidation, inclusive growth and job creation”, she said, is an action budget and many of the actions captured inside have already begun. This, Okonjo-Iweala, said, could be seen in the amount voted for security, agriculture, etc.
“This is a serious budget with a serious purpose which will be implemented with a serious approach. Nigerians are tired of talk and so are we. That’s why the budget is all about action in the areas that matter to Nigerians. There is no big grammar in this budget” the minister said.

To buttress the “action” theme, she cited the significant scale-up in the allocations made to some key sectors such as power, security, agriculture and infrastructural development. She said that there is a strong basis for progress in these and other areas based on this budget. According to her, the 2012 budget would be standing on four pillars which include, macro-economic stability, structural reforms, governance/institutions and investing in priority areas. These, she said, were established to help achieve fiscal consolidation, inclusive growth and job creation.

The minister identified key initiatives and developments, which will form a key part of government’s focus.
This includes plans to reduce domestic debt profile which stands at 16.4 per cent with more attention being paid on revenue side. This, according to her, would involve blocking leakages, improving corporate tax collection and boosting internally-generated revenues.

ib55:

Mr presido de fear or what? he cant take a decision on anything! no wander the country is like this, we have a clueless and indecisive leader. so all u guys calling for a revolution i hate to disappoint u, but the guy no fit act.

Lasinoh:

Wetin this wor-wor 'Reubena Abagana" woman dey tok?
Will wait for now?
Till when?

She be Minister of Misinformation or Mismanagment of Finance?

Kobojunkie:

If after hullabaloo about how subsidy removal is the only way forward, knowing fully well that it's removal will hurt the vast majority of Nigerians ,more than the few who make up the oil cartel, this man decides, only a couple of days to back down for fear that their will be a mass uprising (not because he is even making the decision for the right reason . . . for the good of the Nigerian people), then I pray Nigerians understand then that this is not the kind of leader we need at this time in our development.

Rhino.5dm:

Jonadunce Goatluck and his to-and-fro retarrded policies. Coming from mumu that can't even take a stance when he announces the banned on super eagles, only to quickly revert and lick his vomit.

Surely, the most useless, clueless, stuupid president of all time is on board. Little wonder he laugh at any slight giving opportunity like a little pusssy!

The goons shouting and chanting fresh air mantra before elections, are stuck with the most brainless to ever occupy the Aso Rock. If he didn't perform as Deputy Governor,Governor,Vice President or even as lecturere, what difference do you think he make?

"We voted for GEJ not PDP ","Na God choose am ", "The man get LUCK ooo!". . .!!! !!!

Rhino.5dm:

Ofcourse, we all know that the mooroon lacks any single functionable brain cell. They said the country will collapse if the fuel subsidy is not remove, only turn around and start putting objections in the middle of what they believed and held soooo much, as the only way out. Irony of reetards!!

So, who is the FOOOOOL here? The useless PDP-president that keeps on changing and editing what he said, by sluggishly applying his usual escape route of "I was mis-quoted or mis-understood"? Or the 22 million brainless Nigerans that put this air-head in Aso Rock?

Truely, they deserve this type of leaders!!!

"Na God send am","He is the Messiah","The man get LUCK oo","Na God Choose am". . .The ediots spewing all this trash are now stuck with abject poverty and glaring consequence of running a country on LUCK.

Lemme catch you chatting rubbish about the president you massively vote in .

Me, i no send you ooooo!

^^^
Well Said!

obowunmi:

Get rid of Goodluck like they did Ghaddafi.

Evil Brain:

[size=20pt]The woman is lying. The subsidy has been removed and the savings have been used to pad the 2012 budget.[/size]
The new budget without subsidy is 6% higher than last year's which included over N600billion for it. If the government was still deciding whether to remove subsidy they would have kept some money aside to pay for it meaning that this budget should have been significantly smaller.

So unless GEJ is planning to illegally fund subsidy with N1 trillion naira of mostly debt this year then this story can't be true. [size=20pt]I find it hard to believe that Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala is stûpid enough not to know this therefore, she must be lying through her teeth.[/size]

Rhino.5dm:

Oh! Blazay my suger lulu, where have you been?

Thank God you survived that winch TB Jashua. How many times una wan ban Blazay sef?

kokoA:

Maybe they are yet to purchase the weapons that will be used to quell the probable revolt subsidy removal will trigger Lets wait till the 900 billion naira 'defence' founds is approved first

Lasinoh:



You don come again?
Mu he he he he
All these Alaye 'Yoruba' boys for disi NL huh?
I beg. . .make I close from work. . . make we begin post pissshure e jor.
I loved that session nor be small. I saved soooooooo many NL pictures my computer begin dey protest against wor-worism!
Dem even ban the thread 'along' with moi. . .YOU were spared by Mr And Mrs Nairaland?
Na wa for NL-WI-FI. . . .HOT-"G"-SPOT. . . .CAP-POOOSIE-NO connections o!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_der_Waals_force#London_dispersion_force

My own na 'Van Der Wale' connections. . . aka "London Dispersion Forces". . . I swear!
Na you biko!

Beaf:

The fuel subsidy is not featured at all in the budget, yet some guguru brained lemmings think it has been suspended. The place is full of comedians!
You people should be at Eagle Square, carrying out your meaningless, directionless, ethnically bigotted "revolution."

Is it a surprise that whenever there are calls for ideologically driven and philosophically grounded changes (such as are embodied in the PIB or the bills put forward for true federalism), our unicellular brained (but "revolutionary" ) nematodes are missing in action? Those are issues for real action, why don't we hear about "revolution" where they are concerened? Foolish people always seek ways to self-immolate for foolish reasons.

Lol!

Nigeria: 2011 Budget confirms the saying “a man on the edge of a precipice does not think”
Written by Ola Balogun in Lagos Monday, 10 January 2011
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On Wednesday, 15th December 2010, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan presented the 2011 budget for the approval of the National Assembly. The budget has been nicknamed “budget of consolidation”. The nickname, is a source of concern for every thinking Nigerian. For, what are we consolidating?

Five thousand Nigeria children between the ages of 1 to 5 die annually, and, as if this were not enough, the probability that a Nigerian woman will die during childbirth is 12 times the world average, simply because of large scale poverty and the deplorable state of our health facilities. Over 10 million Nigerian youth of basic school age are roaming the streets because of lack of access to free and quality education. The unemployment rate in Nigeria, which is placed at 43%, is one of the highest in the world. How can it be otherwise when the manufacturing sector which used to be over 14% of the GDP in the 1980s is now less than 1% of GDP. It is estimated that Nigeria will need 174,000 Megawatts of electricity to power its size and industrial growth, but has actually been struggling between 2000 to 3000 Megawatts. Therefore, if the 2011 budget is truly a budget of consolidation, Nigerians need to quietly tighten their belts, because tougher times actually lie ahead.
Fat cats continue to cut the lion share

Despite the N45bn slashed from the total budgetary allocation to the National Assembly in the 2011 federal budget, the fat cats still continue to parasitically consume our collective wealth. This cut came amid the public outcry over the jumbo salaries and allocations being received by the legislators. N156bn allocated to the National Assembly in the 2010 budget has been cut to N111.23bn in the 2011 budget; the further breakdown shows that N108.03bn is for recurrent expenditure. The Ministry of Education which receives the highest recurrent expenditure among MDAs in the budget will get N304.3bn; legislators who just numbered 560 received over 36% of the amount meant for over 3.1 million productively working salary earners.

Rather than tackling the developmental programmes, the policy of bribing and corrupting Niger Delta militants will still continue unabated in 2011 according to the budget. N78.52bn is allocated for the payment of “stipends” to repentant ex-militants. This amount is almost twice the total amount allocated as the wage bill for federal civil servants in the budget. Despite the recent wage adjustment for civil servants, occasioned by the recent wage increment as agreed between the Federal Government and organized labour, the total package is expected to take a paltry N41.49bn. Almost a million civil servants will have to manage with N41.49bn despite the over 50% increment, while 560 legislators will have “to manage” with N111.23bn in spite of the N45bn cut from last year’s figure and less than a thousand ex-militants will have to share N78.52bn. What sort of fair society are we living in?

However, N542bn is earmarked for debt servicing in the 2011 budget alone. This amount is more than the total allocation for education and health combined. The main insult upon this injury is that in 2006, Obsanjo’s government celebrated an end to the debt burden. The celebrations were so elaborate that it was estimated they cost N2.4bn in the entertainment of guests alone. Between 2006 and 2010 a debt of over $32bn has been re-accumulated. It is crystal clear that there is really nothing visible to justify this huge debt. What we have been witnessing is the ongoing collapse of the social infrastructure and the unending attacks on the condition of the working class.

The Nigerian ruling class is incapable of existing without accumulating outrageous debt; they consume immensely without being productive. Their only source of amassing wealth remains the public coffers. Corruption is a symptom of a decaying, inept and absolutely inefficient ruling class. The source of the crisis remains their backwardness, greed and profit seeking which accurately describes the capitalist system, the system Nigerian ruling class has sworn to aggressively defend.


[size=14pt]Where are we going from here?
[/size]
With over 89% of the national wealth belonging to the less than 1% of super rich Nigerians, Nigeria has one of the highest inequality rates in the world. And rather than the 2011 budget closing the gap, it will further widen it. With over 50% of capital expenditure going into servicing debt on loans that we cannot trace, it means the journey to meaningful infrastructural development is still a long way ahead. If the N45bn cut from legislators’ salary were spent on civil servants’ wages this would have guaranteed the demanded N52, 000 minimum-wage. Just as we have said in many of our previous editions, it is mere economic forgery that an increment in the salary of workers will inevitably lead to inflation; what we are asking for is a fair distribution of our collective wealth and not the printing of more money.

With over 83% of expected revenue coming from oil, the Nigerian ruling class cares nothing about what happens to other sectors of the economy, as long as oil continues to flow. This explains why they can keep bribing “ex militants” with such huge amounts. If the price of oil goes down this whole set up enters a deep crisis. The budget is predicated on $65 per barrel, and anything below this is enough to destabilise the arrangement.

[size=18pt]If we leave the present crop of Nigerian ruling class to continue ruling for the next 100 years, things will only go from bad to worse. Nigeria is in dire need of a new leadership, a leadership that will value labour over profit, that is, the living over the dead; a leadership that will focus on the creation of wealth and not the consumption of the sweat of others, that is, a leadership that will be based on socialism and not this blood-thirsty retrogressive capitalist system. What is required is a leadership that consists of the most advanced, intelligent, heroic and talented vanguard of the working class and not on the present inept, foolish, inefficient capitalist class that have held us down for the past 50 years.
[/size]
Source: Workers' Alternative (Nigeria)

Kobojunkie:

I am against its removal, but this man has to go ahead with his subsidy removal plan come January 1st 2012. He has resisted every call to instead attack the problem at the root, and that is the corruption that plagues the distribution process. He has insisted from the beginning that the only way forward is for subsidy to be removed. He needs to follow through with this plan because Nigerians need to get a severe taste of what their choices can lead to. Who knows, fairies could show up and make all well .