The General Superintendent of Holy Spirit Mission, also known as the Happy Family Church, Charles Ighele, has offered some practical suggestions to the Federal Government (FG) to avert the looming nationwide protest.
Ighele made this known while reacting to the nationwide protest scheduled to commence on August 1, 2024, urging the government to reduce the current pump price of premium motor spirit (fuel).
“Before he was sworn in as president, I cautioned in an interview I granted in the newspaper he owns about falling into the trap of fuel subsidy removal.
“Something Buhari was careful or scared to do. The president went ahead to make the same error Jonathan made when he increased the price of petrol early in his presidency,” Ighele stated.
He stated that pump price reduction was the magic wand used by former President Goodluck Jonathan to quell protest during his tenure.
“This led to protests which seriously affected the popularity of Jonathan within a few months after he was elected.
“What Jonathan did was to reduce the pump price with the amount with which he increased it. That step stopped the protests. I will advise the president to effect the reduction of the pump price of petrol to a bearable limit,” Ighele stated.
He disclosed further that there is nothing wrong if the president should address the nation before the scheduled date of the protest.
He noted that the happenings in the country shows that the government is getting richer while the generality of the people are getting poorer, which is an aberration.
According to Ighele, great leaders are made during tough times. He however urged the government to explore other sources of revenue generation aside from fuel subsidy removal, increase taxes, among others.
He added that the president should also be careful to know that revenue generating systems that worked in mostly urban Lagos might not work in other places; hence should not be implemented hook line and sinker in other parts of Nigeria.
“With my knowledge of political development in many nations of the world, governments that accept to reduce its share of the wealth of the nation and allow the people’s welfare to be of greater importance survived more than those hawkish governments that insisted on having the wealth and to use the wealth to provide palliative and other social services for the people,” Ighele stated.
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