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Garba Shehu, a Senior Special Assistant to the immediate past president, Muhammadu Buhari has explained that the former president put petrol subsidy removal and the unification of the country’s foreign exchange rates on hold because his party had an election to win.
Shehu made this known in a statement on Monday, June 26, 2023, four weeks after President Bola Ahmed Tinubu declared that ‘fuel subsidy is gone’ in his first presidential speech.
Shehu said Buhari could not have removed fuel subsidy during his last days in office because pre-election polls showed that the All Progressives Congress (APC) would have lost the election if the president had made the decision to remove fuel subsidy.
The statement reads in part, “We must be politically honest with ourselves. The Buhari administration in its last days could not have gone the whole way because the APC had an election to win. And that would have been the case with any political party that was seeking election for another term with a new principal at its head.
“Poll after polls showed that the party would have been thrown out of office if the decision as envisaged by the new Petroleum Industry Act was made.”
According to Shehu, his statement explaining Buhari’s inaction on fuel subsidy, was prompted by the repeated questions on why the former president failed to unify the currency and remove fuel subsidy.
He said he was forced to answer the questions because the “APC that is best suited to speak” failed to do so.
He maintained that Buhari may not have removed fuel subsidy as Tinubu did on his first day as president, but the ex-president “in vitally important stages removed every other budget-busting, egregious, economic-growth-crushing subsidy along the way”.
Garba further explained that Buhari removed subsidies on aviation fuel, kerosene, diesel, cooking gas, fertiliser, electricity and Hajj/Christian Pilgrim.
“For those with short memories, many of those subsides were all in place when president Buhari was elected to office in 2015: all those in place were gone by May 2023 — including the annual fertilizer subsidy that weighed 60–100 billion Naira (that’s trillion naira in about 10 years — yes you read that right) heavy on the federal budget each year”, he said.
He added that the removal of fuel subsidy could not have happened at a time when tensions were high in the country.