APC’s Unspoken Rules of Fuel Subsidy

During Goodluck Jonathan’s administration, the All Progressives Congress heavily criticized and campaigned against the removal of fuel subsidy. Now the ruling party find itself dealing with the aftermath of the same fuel subsidy removal it had rejected.

The voice of Ganiat Fawehinmi, the wife of the late eminent civil rights lawyer, Gani Fawehinmi, was loud on the third day of the 2012 Occupy Nigeria protest: ‘When you see Babangida,’ she said, ‘ask him where he kept our $12 million windfall. When you see Iweala, ask her if this is the way the government of where she came from treat their citizens.’ Eventually, she screamed, ‘If you see Diezani Alison-Madueke, ask her how she got the money to buy a house in Vietnam. God will punish all of them.’ The crowd she was firing at roared back too, with even more gusto. ‘If you no gree for ₦65 na war o, anything wey you want we go give you, na revolution go be the next step o,’ two men out of the sea of protesters declared matter-of-factly to the incumbent president, Goodluck Jonathan. All these people, perhaps over a hundred thousand, were tightly absorbed at the Ojota axis of Lagos, vehemently remonstrating against the official removal of fuel subsidy by the Petroleum Product Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA) on 1 January 2012.

Following the PPPRA’s jarring announcement, the price of petrol had immediately increased from ₦65 to ₦141 per litre in filling stations across Nigeria. (In the shadow market, the increase was more like ₦100 to, at least, ₦200 per litre.) Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, then the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), almost immediately justified the subsidy removal by contending that petrol subsidies cost the government $8 billion during the previous fiscal year and that the programme remained unsustainable given that subsidies should primarily cover economic production and not consumption. But the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), the major opposition party, was eating up none of it. In a statement by ACN’s national publicity secretary, Lai Mohammed, the party averred that Jonathan’s removal of the ‘non-existent’ fuel subsidy was not in the interest of Nigerians since it came at a time when the majority of Nigerians were barely surviving. It concluded that along with a consortium of political parties, it had warned the government that existing refineries should be made to work before a removal of fuel subsidy could be contemplated.

The market price of petrol was eventually pegged back to ₦97 per litre due to the ripple effects from the ferocity of the nationwide protests, even as the government promised to continue to pursue full deregulation of the downstream petroleum sector. Yet a salient takeaway from the entire fiasco was not just the Peoples Democratic Party government’s timid inconsistency with regards to the administration of fuel subsidy. It was also ACN’s staunch resistance to the increment of petrol price through subsidy withdrawal. Did ACN ever put itself in the shoes of the ruling party and wonder how it would go about ensuring sustainable market sanity in the downstream petroleum sector? Did it earnestly consider if it would fix refineries before removing petrol subsidy just like it advised the ruling government, and would it obey the letters of the law if it directly prescribed unrestricted free market pricing of petroleum products in Nigeria? More importantly, a bigger question to draw was: what does fuel subsidy mean, not to the throng of Nigerian masses, but as a political issue to the political parties, ACN, now rebranded as part of the larger All Progressives Congress (APC), being a focal reference point...