One week after President Bola Tinubu announced the removal of subsidy payment on Premium Motor Spirit also known as petrol, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the February 25, Peter Obi, on Tuesday broke his silence on the much-criticised move.
He said rather than go through a “forceful removal”, he would have provided “various relieving policies” to cushion the effect of subsidy removal. “If you have followed me very well right from the time I was a member of Jonathan’s economic management team, I consistently maintained that subsidy should be removed because I see it as organized crime.
Obi, a former Anambra State governor, spoke with judicial correspondents at the Court of Appeal, venue of the Presidential Election Petitions Tribunal on Tuesday, “I’ve actually been in support of the removal of subsidies right from the President Goodluck Jonathan era, when I was a member of the Economic Management team,” he tweeted.
“People were just stealing the resources of the country and I showed it empirically in my statistical analysis that we were not consuming the amount of fuel they claimed we consumed.”
Obi gave a “tooth pain” removal analogy saying, “If you approach a dentist to remove a painful tooth, he will apply a local anesthetic to numb the area around the tooth so you do not feel pain.
Obi’s stance followed the position of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate in the last election, Atiku Abubakar who also faulted the manner in which fuel subsidy was removed by Tinubu, a former Lagos State governor.
The President during his inaugural speech on May 29 at the Eagle Square in Abuja had announced the removal of subsidy payment on petrol. The President said that the immediate past administration of Muhammadu Buhari did not make provisions for subsidy in the 2023 budget beyond June.
