Festus Keyamo, the Chief Spokesman for the All Progressives Congress Presidential Campaign, has clarified that President Bola Tinubu did not remove fuel subsidy. Keyamo explained that certain media outlets have been misrepresenting the situation by claiming that Tinubu’s government eliminated the subsidy, despite the fact that President Tinubu explicitly stated during his inaugural speech on May 29 that subsidy had been abolished.
Keyamo, a former Minister of State for Labour, further clarified that Tinubu’s administration had inherited a system where there was no provision for subsidy in the 2023 Appropriation Act from June 2023 onwards. Additionally, the recently enacted Petroleum Industry Act does not include any provision for subsidy.
Through a series of tweets from his official Twitter handle, @fkeyamo, Keyamo emphasized that the media’s portrayal of Tinubu’s government removing subsidy is incorrect. Instead, he emphasized that the absence of subsidy in the 2023 Appropriation Act and the Petroleum Industry Act were pre-existing conditions that Tinubu’s administration inherited.
“President Tinubu merely acknowledged this state of affairs in his inaugural speech at the Eagle Square.
“So, any advocate of subsidy should convince the Nigerian people why President Tinubu should start on a note of illegality by promising to reintroduce something which the law has taken away. They should also convince the Nigerian people why President Tinubu should embark on a present illegality that gulped $10 billion of our scarce or unavailable resources in 2022 alone.”
He added that those claiming to defend the rights or welfare of workers should convince the Nigerian people that the $10 billion injected into the economy annually will not jumpstart the economy enough to create massive jobs and even increase the same minimum wage they complain about.
