The former media aid to Nigeria’s ex-President, Muhammadu Buhari has said that, had the previous government removed petroleum subsidy before the 2023 elections, President Bola Tinubu couldn’t have won the 2023 presidential elections and also the party would have performed badly.
The former president spoke through his media aid Mallam Garba Shehu, who explained that the former president withheld the implementation of petrol subsidy removal and the unification of the country’s foreign exchange rates due to the elections.
He made the statement on Monday, June 26, 2023, roughly a month after his principal vacate Aso Rock and same length of period President Bola Ahmed Tinubu declared that subsidy was gone for good.
In his statement, he said removal of fuel subsidy during Buhari’s last days in office would have amounted to insensitivity to the political atmosphere which would have also threatened the All Progressives Congress (APC) chances of winning, while also putting the party’s presidential candidate in a disadvantageous position.
According to him: “We must be politically honest with ourselves. The Buhari administration in its last days could not have gone the whole way because the APC had an election to win. And that would have been the case with any political party that was seeking election for another term with a new principal at its head.
“Poll after polls showed that the party would have been thrown out of office if the decision as envisaged by the new Petroleum Industry Act was made.”
Shehu said his statement was in response to critics who questioned why the former President didn’t implement subsidy removal. He said the party who was in the position to reply them failed to do so, so he had to come out to state the issues clearly.
While defending his principal, Shehu maintained that the period Buhari assumed the leadership of the country and Tinubu’s were different times, but said however, the ex-president “in vitally important stages removed every other budget-busting, egregious, economic-growth-crushing subsidy along the way”.
The former presidential aid mentioned that the ex-president removed subsidy from, kerosene, diesel, cooking gas, fertiliser, electricity and Hajj/Christian Pilgrim.
“For those with short memories, many of those subsides were all in place when president Buhari was elected to office in 2015: all those in place were gone by May 2023 — including the annual fertilizer subsidy that weighed 60–100 billion Naira (that’s trillion naira in about 10 years — yes you read that right) heavy on the federal budget each year”, he said.
