Nigeria: Northern Senators to Fight Against Fuel Subsidy Removal
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Friday, 07 October 2011 |
 Members of the National Assembly from the north of Nigeria are moving to block the Federal Government’s plans to remove fuel subsidies in January. Several lawmakers have met in the city of Abuja to mobilise opposition and prepare strategy for a legislative showdown on the issue.
“We will never support any step to be taken by the federal government to make things difficult for the Nigerian people,” the senators told reporters following their meeting. Senator Ali Ndume was vocal in his objections to the removal of subsidies without measures to counterbalance the impact this would have on citizens. “I'm already lobbying my colleagues in the senate to make sure that the bill does not sail through. The timing is very wrong,” he said. “The subsidy matter is sabotage by some people who the government knows so well.”
Senator Suleiman Adokwe (pictured), who previously served on the Downstream Petroleum Committee at the National Assembly, did admit that the present system was in need of reform, particularly with regard to transparency in the NNPC, a public organisation assigned to manage the government's interests in the Nigerian oil industry. “In the Sixth Senate, I served on the Downstream Petroleum Committee… there were speculations here and there that the subsidy was getting into the wrong hands; it wasn't getting to the real people who actually needed the subsidy,” he said. “We tried to ask so many questions, to find out why and what was happening. My biggest grouse then was that the NNPC account is shrouded in so much secrecy and nobody knew what was going on there. It's a fundamental error that a major organisation like that, which is responsible for our wealth, its activities are shrouded in secrecy.
"The military made the NNPC Act in such a way that they are answerable only to Mr President. Its budget needs to be properly scrutinized so that we would know how they are managing the subsidy. In spite of the fact that we are paying trillions of naira for oil subsidy, the pump price is still very high in the north; particularly in the north east and the north west. There's still continued shortage of petroleum products in that part of the country and we wonder really who is being subsidised,” he added. “We really need to know how the subsidy is being managed. If we know how it's being managed, probably there may be no need to take it off.”
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