OK_2_NV:

who owns OandO sef?
I heard it belongs to tinubu.
How true is this?
If so thats why ACN doesn't want subsidy removed

nosa2:

A statement by Sanusi made in a yahoo group

It needs to fight corruption and show seriousness in that.

OK_2_NV:

who owns OandO sef?
I heard it belongs to tinubu.
How true is this?
If so thats why ACN doesn't want subsidy removed

rasputinn:

Of course it's Bola Ahmed Tinubu

Infact your post is one of the smartest on this thread.

Kudos to the other guys that have their thinking caps on:ekt_bear,the OP etc

obowunmi:

I am beginning to support the removal of FUEL SUBSIDY. I want to see how Nigeria looks like at the end of the year.  Will it IMPROVE ? Why not give it a TRY.  I think that is the challenge the federal government should give its people.

kolexy:

Ocean and Oil bought majority stake in the former Unipetrol

Ocean and Oil was founded by Wale Tinubu, Omamofe Boyo, and Onajite Okoloko(Ibori's point man in Econet and Notore).

Oando has nothing to do with Bola Tinubu.

Here is the thing. the cost of fuel subsidy was actually less than 300 billion NGN previously. How did it become N1.3 Trillion? ? ? ?

Some one is telling a profound lie here.

Pain:

Another Thread by Apologists on GEJ Payroll!

Pain:

What you fools who think only you are in possession of brains to UNDERSTAND SUBSIDY don't get is that Nigerians are not totally in disagreement of the removal but are against the sharp cut-over without any cushion or palliatives to accommodate the sudden shock. What the VOODOO ECONOMISTS should have advised Jonathan is a GRADUAL/PHASED implementation! This is after providing a bit of evidence as regards social/economic infrastructure like "Work-in-Progress" Refineries etc etc.

Don't come here and act as if it is only you that was born with brains bigger than 95% of Nigerians!!

Bliss4Lyfe:

OK, exactly how much time do u need? 60-70years?  

omo alaro:

Deep Sight (m)« #7 on: Today at 10:57:24 AM »



It became N1.3Trillion because 2011 was an election year and fuel importers getting subsidies for phantom fuel supplied needed to fund PDP, Have you forgotten how PDP spent massively during the elections. Is anyone asking how they came about the huge money spent. I have told my friends long ago that we the masses will be made to pay for the campaign expenses very soon. this is also why the crooks can not be punished. They shared the money with PDP.

surugede:

Thank you sir.

but my question is, how does the removal subsidy benefit the ordinary Nigerian while that sum removed on the pump price now is  being paid by the masses, in order words, the importers losses nothing as that which thy has lost in the government (subsidy) is now being provided by the hungry Nigerians.

nosa2:

A statement by Sanusi made in a yahoo group



''I am not complaining about insults I am used to that. I just believe that an insult is not an argument and when people resort to personal abuse they have run out of logic.
>
> But to then go beyond me and extend it to my dead grandfather and his "descendants" ie my late father his siblings etc I think goes beyond the pale. As a Nigerian-and as an economist-i can take a position on economic matters and this position is one I have had for years even before coming in to the central bank. I have also explained the position on several occasions and criticised government for not doing this before. In 2010 at a public hearing in the House of Reps on the 25pct saga I alerted the nation of what I considered a potential big scam around subsidies and urged for its removal. No one paid attention. The economics is very clear to me. That it is unpopular is also understandable. The British public is unhappy with Tory budget cuts. The Greeks went on riot over austerity. Italian parliamentarians came to blows before Berlusconi was thrown out of office. The US congress is yet to approve Obamas tax increases.
>
> Economic decisions-by definition-ALWAYS must involve a cost or an opportunity cost since for them to qualify as economic they must involve a choice in resource allocation among competing uses. An enlightened debate is one that weighs the pros and cons of removing subsidy and continuing with it.
>
> Removing it has costs in terms of nigerians paying more for PMS-which by the way is not the fuel for genrators, power plants, production facilities, heavy duty goods transportation trucks and even luxury buses. It is fuel used by the middle class and car owners to drove around town and from city to city not to employ workers and produce goods and services. Diesel which is critical to manufacturing and employment creation is not subsidized as the subsidy was removed years ago by obasanjo. Nigerians said nothing then because it was blue collar workers that got retrenched by factories. Those speaking now on the internet and facebook and twitter and newspapers are not workers but middle class elite who use PMS in their smart cars so let's stop all the ideological pretence. This is not about elite and masses but an intra-elite discourse.
>
> I will summarise the issues and I write as a Nigerrian economist and public intellectual not as a public servant:
>
> 1. I am a strong advocate for subsidies if they are for production and not consumption, and if they benefit the poor and not middle men and rent seekers. The US government subsidizes cotton and wheat farmers and nigeria spends its reserves importing wheat from america and keeping american farmers employed. The OECD countried pay subsidies to cattle farmers. Today Promasidor imports powdered milk from New Zealand and packages in nigeria using our foreign exchange while we have cattle. WAMCO imports milk from the UK and adds water and tins it and calls it "production" of Peak milk. We use our forex to import petroleum products and keep refineries and jobs open in europe. Meanwhile precisely because of market distortions there can be no private sector investment in refineries since no one can make profit seling at the regulated price unless we are going to provide private refineries with crude for next to nothing. Certainly no one can purchase crude at market price, refine it and sell at N65 without huge losses so this explains why there are no private refineries.
>
> 2 what I mention above is the heart of the problem with government economic policy which needs to be changed. The economy since SAP is one that supports imported consumption and not local production, perpetuating dependency, non inclusive growth and insecurity. Why is it that the economy is growing at 7pct annually but the people are getting poorer. Because growth gains are not evenly distributed. Personal income is skewed towards people in the oil industry, telecomms, high finance, stock market, real estate and yes civil servants and politicians who feed on corruption. We produce crude oil but import petroleum products (today the UKs highest exports to nigeria are petroleum products). We have a large cotton belt but import textiles from china (thus keeping their subsidized factories open and jobs in china). We are the world's number 1 producer of cassava but import cassava starch from europe. We have a huge tomato belt in kadawa, jigawa and chad basin but are the world's largest importer of tomato paste-from China and Italy. We can produce rice but we import rice from Thailand and India-most of it from grain reserves that have been in stock for over 5 years, I can go on and on
>
> 3. If above is clear then it is evident that this trajectory can only lead to disaster. We will continue to spend our resources promoting growth and employment in our trading partners. Terms of trade shift against us, we can only have foreign reserves because by the good grace of God we have Oil which will be exhausted soon and with new discoveries may become so cheap it loses value. We don't create any value added jobs as the only real production is peasant farming. Oill, telecomms, finance and real estate are not employment intensive. So everyone becomes a civil servant as the economy cannot create jobs. Result? In 2012 budget out of a total N1.8tr recurrent expenditure for the executive arm N1.6tr is on personnel costs not overheads. To reduce this you have to cut salaries or pensions or retrench civil servants. This is the classic trajectory of underdevelopment, de-development and de-industrialisation.
> 4. For the above reasons I am a strong proponent of structural reform and this begins from the fiscal framework. The limited resources of government should be allocated to supporting production-especially if we are running a budget deficit. We cannot keep borrowing to support conspicuous consumption. To support a job creating economy we need to fund power, transportation infrastructure, market infrastructure and access, technical and vocational education etc. We need to build rice processing plants, produce starch and cassava flour and ethanol, process our tomato and milk locally, regenerate our textiles firms (which used to employ 600,000 workers but now employ 30,000!), refine our own crude etc. We cannot even begin to do this if 30pct of govt expenditure is on fuel subsidy, if out of the balance 70pct is recurrent spending, 10pct is debt service, 10pct goes to the niger delta and only 10pct is capital expenditure. So it is about a choice-what do we spend money on and how do we allocate resources?
> 5. We often compare ourselves to other oil producing countries like saudi arabia. What are the facts? With a population of over 160m we produce 2mbpd ie 1 barrel for every 80+ citizens daily. Govt share of revenues if like 50pct of every barrel so it is effectively a barrel for 160 citizens. Saudi Arabia with a 24m population produces over 8mbpd or one barrel for every 3 citizens. In fact in 2010 the nearest OPEC country to nigeria in production per capita was Algeria with a barrel for 30 and algeria is more gas than oil.
>
> With one barrel for 3 citizens dailt saudi arabia is able to provide infrastructure, education, healthcare and social safety nets and have huge savings. It can provide subsidised fuel at a total cost that is a fraction of its savings and even export refined products. It is paying for subsidies ouy od its fiscal savings and not borrowing to pay. We are like a poor man with a rich neighbour. The neighbour buids a good house, buys several cars, eat expensive food, travel abroad every year and still have huge balances in sevral current accounts. Then you choose to live that lifestyle and mortgage your house, take an overdraft from the bank to finance it. Next year it is time to repay the bank, u don't have the money so u go to another bank, borrow enough to pay the first bank principal plus interest and also fund the continuation of the lifestyle. It continues till u can't borrow anymore and the bank throws u and your family out of your house and you lose everything. A responsible father would have long since faced reality and told his family he doesn't earn as much as his neighbour and expectations need to be moderated if they to keep their roof. Of course the children won't be happy at not going to Hawaii for summer and having to take public transport rather than own cars like their neighbour's children. Maybe they will even abuse the father behind his back and call him a miser. That is the cost of leadership.
>
> Finally: removing subsidy is not a silver bullet that solves our economic problems. And there is a huge trust deficit that government has to address. [size=28pt]Government needs to investigate subsidy payments and punish any violations of extant guidelines. It needs to cut on unnecessary and waste ful expenditure. It needs to fight corruption and show seriousness in that. It needs to deliver on capital projects, power and infrastructure including irrigation, farm-level storage and agri-processing. These are all valid issues that are to be taken IN ADDITION to and not in place of subsidy removal.[/size]

efisher:

The experts at the economists also think the way I do on this subject. I guess that makes the writers of the article "GEJ fans" as some have suggested. Lol

texazzpete:

Please use your common sense.
The guys at the Economist are writing that article based on information gleaned from the Government. Mass opposition to the subsidy removal in Nigeria is due to the fact that the 'subsidy' is perhaps the only benefit millions of taxpaying Nigerians were getting from the Federal Government, and the only think making Nigeria's relatively meagre minimum wage acceptable.

Using statistics and words on paper alone to drive decisions alone is foolish. Afterall, logically it would greatly improve the standard of living of Nigerians if we use nerve gas to Kill 110 million people, leaving only 40 million mouths to feed. Does that mean it would be the right decision?

Most Nigerians feel that the money 'saved' from discontinuing the subsidy will be wasted as usual. On paper the likes of GEJ and Okonjo Iweala will babble and whine about 'eminent and reputable Nigerians' but Nigerians know that the NDDC was set up with similar promises and was staffed with 'eminent Nigerians'. look what happened!
We also know what happened to the $20 billion Excess Crude Account  dough shared by GEJ to his Governor buddies for 'infrastructural development'. All that money stolen!

Anybody who has faith in this corrupt and kleptocratic PDP Government is a cretin!

ekt_bear:

If you are spending 7 billion a year on fuel subsidy and 1.4 billion alone goes to Oando, then how on earth can this be a sensible policy for uplifting the common man?

Damn.

So of this 7 billion, Oando and the rest take their share, Benin, Cameroon, Niger Republic take their cut.

How much does the average guy actually see. 10%? 20%?

ekt_bear:

Nigeria’s subsidies
End them at once!
The president will be a brave man if he fulfils his promise to end cheap petrol
Dec 31st 2011 | LAGOS | from the print edition
PETROL subsidies are thought to cost Africa’s second-largest economy $7 billion a year—and Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, says it is a priority for him to get rid of them in 2012. But most Nigerians think cheap fuel is the only benefit they get from living in an oil-rich country. As the prospect of life without subsidies looms, queues at petrol stations are lengthening, strikes are threatened and tension is rising.

Nigeria churns out 2m barrels a day (b/d) but imports almost its entire refined-fuel needs, owing to decades of mismanagement and corruption that have left its refineries to rot. Subsidies keep the pump price at $0.41 a litre but if Mr Jonathan has his way, this could rise to $0.74, in a country where most people live on less than $2 a day.

Successive governments have tried and failed to deregulate fuel imports. Mr Jonathan may show more backbone. But despite promises of safety nets to protect the poor and the need for new infrastructure and for improvements to the ragged electricity supply, Nigerians fear that the money saved by cutting fuel subsidies will be swallowed up by political fat cats.

The fuel subsidy drains cash from the state. The government has revealed that the chief beneficiaries are the 100-odd companies owned by Nigeria’s richest people, including Oando, the country’s largest indigenous private oil-and-gas firm, which alone netted $1.4 billion.[b] The subsidies also highlight the tortuous ways of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), which has deliberately overestimated the cost of importing refined products and then pockets what is left over. The NNPC admitted in parliament that it could not account for 65,000 b/d of crude oil it should be refining, worth $7m a day at today’s price.
[/b]
[b]The government’s chronic failure to build working refineries has benefited middlemen. Imported petrol is siphoned off by third parties who take advantage of the cheap fuel in Nigeria, then smuggle it over the border to neighbouring countries where unsubsidised fuel costs three times Nigeria’s price. Billions of dollars earmarked for renovating refineries has vanished over the years. The country’s four refineries barely function: fine for those with political connections who make fortunes from imported fuel. [/b]If Mr Jonathan stops the scam yet keeps ordinary people calm, it will be a triumph.

http://www.economist.com/node/21542197