Failed subsidy promises: NLC, others blast Jonathan - ask government to revert petrol price to N65

THE stage appeared set for another round of showdown between President Goodluck Jonathan and labour unions on the issue of fuel subsidy with labour on Tuesday asking the Federal Government to revert the pump price of petrol to N65 per litre.

The Nigeria Labour Congress and the Association of Senior Civil Servants of Nigeria said the Jonathan administration had no option other than to reverse the price from its present N97 to the old N65 per litre since the President had said he was rethinking the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment programme.

Jonathan on Monday reportedly told chieftains of the Peoples Democratic Party at their  58th National Executive Committee meeting in Abuja that implementation of the palliatives to cushion the effects of subsidy removal were no longer feasible.

The President said the palliatives had been based on the 100 per cent removal of subsidy on local consumption of fuel.

“This (SURE) is developed with the expectation that we were going to completely deregulate the Downstream sector of the oil industry, the 100 per cent removal of subsidy… we will still come up with a document based on what we get,” he told the PDP members and ordered them to withdraw the circulated SURE document.

The SURE programme had been hurriedly designed in January to douse the tension generated by the sudden removal of subsidy and consequent jump in the pump price of petrol.

The Senate has said it is backing the action of the President. Leader of the Senate, Victor Ndoma-Egba, said Jonathan made the plans based on zero-subsidy arrangement and for which the 2012 budget was prepared.

“The President said he wanted to remove subsidy, Nigerians said they don’t want it removed. Now that he was not able to realise his plan, where will he get the money to carry out that policy,” Ndoma-Egba said.

He, however, stated that the President would still need to work with the savings made from the partial removal of subsidy.

“The President will have to look at the proceeds from partial deregulation and work with what is saved. That is the reason why the document earlier produced should be revised to reflect the current realities,” he said.

Apart from the NLC and the ASCN, the House of Representatives also on Tuesday took a swipe at the President and said it was vindicated concerning its pessimism over the government palliatives.

The Acting General Secretary of the NLC, Mr. Owei Lakemfa, in a telephone interview with one of our correspondents on Tuesday said  the Federal Government  had no option but to revert the fuel pump price from the current N97 to the pre-2012 pump price of fuel.

He said that a recent advertisement in a national daily in which the Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, claimed that the Federal Government realised N15b allocation from the proposed subsidy savings supported the claim that the Federal Government was making some money from the regime change in the pump price of fuel and that the funds realised from the fuel price increase should be adequately utilised to execute projects.

According to Lakemfa, the Federal Government is only trying to prepare the minds of Nigerians against expecting results from the increase in the pump price of petrol in the country by announcing the withdrawal of the programme.

He urged the government to fulfil its promise to use the proceeds of fuel price increase to construct roads, build a second Niger bridge, and other promises contained in the SURE document.

He said that the Nigerian citizenry was seriously interested in what the Federal Government could do with the proceeds from the increase in the pump price of petroleum products.

He called on the Federal Government to ensure that the Ministries of Petroleum and Finance were cleansed based on the serious discoveries made at the Subsidy Probe by the House of Representatives.

 “Right from the onset, organised labour believed that the Federal Government was not sincere with this programme but the government claimed that we were going to get results in six months. What government is saying now is that we should not expect results,” the NLC scribe said.

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