OPINION: Tinubu Sprayed The Country With Petrol, Light Matches

By Adeola Soetan

Pro-market President Bola Tinubu threw his fellow citizens under the moving truck of market forces on his inauguration day by declaring that oil subsidy is gone, without entering his office to carefully study the real market situation in the oil industry do price control.

To defend that terrible wrong step on his first day on the basis that the outgone Muhammadu Buhari failed regime didn’t budget for “oil subsidy” beyond June is too puerile and untenable. Anyone with marginal intelligence should know that an outgone regime can’t dictate to a new government its policy stand.

The simplest thing Tinubu should have done was to have requested an “oil subsidy” supplementary budget like he now did for his N500 billion palliative budget, form his cabinet first, thoroughly scrutinize with experts the conflicting figures being bandied around over the years by NNPC, petroleum and finance ministries, CBN and other relevant agencies of government, invite all core stakeholders including labour leadership for all to see the actual from the fake figures before arriving at a decision.

But like his predecessors, he failed to do that because there’s nothing factual to show beyond figure juggling.

Tinubu too was not convinced that there was fidelity in the operation of the oil industry when he cried out during his campaign: “E ba gbe epo pamo, e ba fi owo kun owo epo, a ma dibo, a ma wole” (if you like hoard petrol, if you like hike petrol price, we will vote and we will win.)

So why the rush to foist maximum profit-centred market forces on the citizens who are yet to recuperate from the pains and agony of the Buhari regime of eight years, of failed promises, sorrow, tears and blood?

I ask, Price Control of what? Of foodstuffs, goods and services that their costs continue to jump higher with devalued naira, low purchasing power and flying inflation as multiplier effects of the unprecedented hike in pump price, now twice in two months. What an audacity caused by his undying love for market forces!

If you don’t know what a multi-chain adverse reaction in a mono-economy is, when a president disrupts the central structure of the economy, now you know the pains and the pangs whose end may not be in sight for a long time to come.

This is because the selling and buying market now has become disorderly speculative. No economy grows in a state of “not sure what the market price will be the next moment”.

Only a few big businesses have shock absorbers for such disorderliness caused by “subsidy” removal. Small and medium-scale buying and selling businesses will die by instalment and throw more people into unemployment, it’s a matter of time.

The Federal government cannot control the prices of goods and services it does not produce but it can control the price through subsidy what it (nation) produces like oil and gas whose cost will invariably control the prices of other commodities.

Instead of demanding price control on foodstuffs, goods and services as an escape route which is even impossible under the current harsh economic policy and uncertainty of what next, how and when the petrol price will be hiked again, what reasonable realistic people should demand is a drastic reduction in the price of petrol because that is the cause of the price jump of other goods and services. Causes and effects are an elementary economics term and a common philosophy of life.

It’s funny to hear many, unthinking, spontaneous, automated or recruited members of the “fuel subsidy” removal orchestra lamenting the current government unleashed a severe state of the economy and total dislocation in the economic lives of the citizenry. So they didn’t give a thought to the after-effects of the subsidy removal they supported. More embarrassing is to see the 2012 anti-oil subsidy removal civil society “warriors” including many human rights activists falling sheepishly for the removal of “subsidy” now when nothing has fundamentally changed economically and in the corruption in the oil industry. Their U-turn may be for a lack of ideological understanding of the 2012 protest against “subsidy removal”. It may also be because of blind political partisanship or just being naive.

The current bad economic situation is an ideological class battle, as usual, between neo-liberal pro-market forces, aka Team IMF/World Bank and anti-market, pro-regulation forces, aka People’s Economic Survival Team.

It had been an irreconcilable economic battle since the Structural Adjustment Program, SAP, was unleashed on Nigeria in the 80s during Babangida’s failed military regime. Total deregulation of the commanding heights of the economy including oil and gas has always been on the table of the IMF but the resistance of the masses, revolutionary, radical organisations and labour union leaders made it impossible over the years.

Those who are calling on God to intervene in this Tinubu-inflicted economic crisis are merely wasting their time because the economic crisis is never resolved by spiritualism. China is a good reference here.

The president of a nation does not spontaneously spray the country with petrol, light matches economically speaking, and when the citizens are feeling the intense heat they start praying to God to quench the fire. That will be unreasonable.