No plan to remove fuel subsidy now, FG insists

Nigeria is not planning to remove fuel subsidy now against the call by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) call and the ongoing panic buying of gasoline by motorists over rumour of impending deregulations of the downstream sector.
Zainab Ahmed. Nigeria's finance minister confirmed the government position not to tamper with subsidy against the backdrop of long queues emerging at some filling stations across the country in the last one week.
Ahmed, who spoke in Washington DC said the government is yet to find alternative to fuel subsidy.
“There is no plan to remove subsidy now because we have not yet found an alternative package to subsidy. We will not remove subsidy without another social safety net package,” the minister said.
“One of the issues that always comes up in the report, especially by the IMF as a corporate body, is how we handle fuel subsidy. In principle, the IMF is saying fuel subsidies are better removed so that you can use the resources for other important sectors.
"In principle, that is a fact. But in Nigeria, we don’t have plans to remove fuel subsidy at this time because we have not yet designed buffers that can enable us to remove fuel subsidy and provide cushions for our people. So, there is no plan to remove subsidy.
"We will be discussing with various groups. If we have to, what are the alternatives? We have not yet found viable alternatives. So, we are not yet at the point of removing fuel subsidy. Therefore, every rumour on plans to remove subsidy should be discarded.”
The leaders of the Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) and the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association (PENGASSAN) have warned that the advice by the IMF to remove subsidy would destabilise the nation.
The oil workers described a statement on boosting Nigeria’s economy credited to IMF’s media chief for Africa as injurious to the citizenry. It created panic buying, hoarding of petroleum products, and pushed up the prices of goods and services, they said.
The general secretaries of NUPENG Olawale Afolabi and PENGASSAN Okugbawa Lumumba said the statement was poisonous and wondered why IMF was still advising the government to inflict more hardship on the people.
“We empathise with them (Nigerian workers) and will not turn blind eyes to any further attempt to increase their pains and impoverish them further. It is quite bewildering and baffling that IMF is not considering the pains and agonies Nigerians went through, even to achieve the acknowledged gains of 2018, with almost two-thirds of the world’s hungriest people among Nigerians,” the secretaries said in a statement.