Presidential Spokesman, Femi Adesina has explained why President Muhammadu Buhari could not remove fuel subsidy until now even after describing it as a fraud.
In an interview on Channels Television on Wednesday night, Adesina said his principal’s inability to remove fuel subsidy was due to economic and social factors.
He asserted that removing subsidy on petrol makes a lot of economic sense but does not make any social sense, stressing that the President needed to weigh his options because of the social consequences involved.
The presidential aide said that petrol subsidy had stayed longer than required. He added that almost every Nigerian has now come to the realisation that it must come to a stop.
He said: “Removing fuel subsidies makes a lot of economic sense but does it make social sense? President Buhari is somebody that looks at the social sense of whatever he will do. But the time has come for it to go.
“In the beginning, his (Buhari’s) position was: what was subsidy really? But over the years it became evident that the country was bleeding, the economy was bleeding, there was a lot of hemorrhage which needed to be stopped and the time came and that time is now.
“The truth that nobody can deny is that the fraud of subsidy has stayed for so long. Each time there is an attempt to fight the fraud, you have to contend with the labour force which is equal to the social sense. It is said that when a rat patches on a sensitive part of your body and you want to use a sledgehammer to kill it , you have to be careful bause the fly may go away and you end up damaging the sensitive part of your body. So it was the social consequences of it that the government was considering.“
