President Bola Tinubu has said that Nigerian lived fake lives before the petrol subsidy removal in 2023.
Tinubu said this at the combined 34th and 35th convocation ceremonies of the Federal University of Technology Akure (FUTA) in Ondo State, noting that his twin policies of petrol subsidy removal and exchange rate unification were meant to save the Nigerian economy from collapse.
“We took the baton of authority at a time when our economy was nose-diving as a result of heavy debts from fuel and dollar subsidies,” Tinubu, represented by Wahab Egbewole, vice-chancellor of the University of Ilorin, said.
He said the subsidies were targeted at supporting the poor and making life better for all Nigerians, stressing that the economy needed drastic actions to avert collapse.
“Unfortunately, the good life we thought we were living was a fake one that was capable of leading the country to a total collapse unless drastic efforts were urgently taken.”
President Tinubu announced the removal of petrol subsidy on May 29, 2023. This decision has pushed the price of a litre of petrol beyond N1, 000 at filling stations across the nation. The subsidy removal was followed by the foreign exchange market unification, which has now seen the naira exchange at over N1,600/$ at both official and parallel markets. Both reforms have been painful to Nigerians, shooting up the cost of living in Africa’s most populous nation.
“The need to salvage the future of our children, and bring the country back from the brink of collapse necessitated the strategic decisions to remove the fuel subsidy and also unify the exchange rates. I am not unaware of the consequences of the tough decisions on our people. I sincerely wish there could be softer options,” Tinubu said.
He noted that the nation’s intellectuals and experts on whom the nation has massively invested huge resources to train in the interest of our country are migrating overseas in large numbers “at a time their services are most required at home.”
“It is heart-rending and the syndrome is not the solution to our problems,” he said.
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