The country was in a rage. Who announces that at the beginning of the year? Plus, that was basically the simplest thing the country enjoyed from the government, so why should the subsidy be removed? A lot of people would suffer the consequences of the removal because many of the citizens wouldn’t be able to afford it. The frontliners of the opposition roared.
The decision to remove the subsidy was not only the idea of the president, but also highly backed by the then finance minister, a great woman who now rules the world of trade organization today. According to the finance minister at the time, removing the subsidy would help the country have more money to diversify and invest into other sectors like infrastructures, and health, but the country wouldn’t listen to that.
Gradually, this rage graduated into a protest across the country on January 2, and organizations started to embark on strike. Offices were locked, trades on standby bringing the country’s economic activities to a complete halt. I was actively affected by the protest because everyone dumped their vehicles including all commercial drivers. We trekked to wherever we went and stayed home if the distance was too far to be trekked.
We sat stuck with the radio to listen to the news for updates perhaps the president would rescind his order and return the price to what it was.
We waited for the news, only to hear that major unions announced their decisions to join the strike on January 9, 2012. The Nigerian Trades Union Congress, and the National Labour Congress. Few days later, the Nigerian Medical Association and Nigerian Bar Associations also joined the strike. The forces were not left behind. They also joined the protests to make sure the president renounced the subsidy removal.
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During this process, the president came on air again to announce a 25% cut in the salary of all ministers and commissioners, but that made no sense to the nation. The rage of the subsidy was still in full blow. So, nobody listened.
On January 16, 2012, the president finally gave in to the request. He partially brought back the subsidy making the fuel sell for ninety-five naira instead of the one hundred and twenty naira after the subsidy removal.
The year is 2023, and on the first day at office, the new president announced removal of fuel subsidy making the price of fuel to jump from two hundred naira to over one thousand naira per litre, yet the country is quiet. Why? That’s because the frontliners of the protest in 2012 are the ones in government now, and nobody dares to oppose them.
If only we had deep understanding of what the 2012 president planned to do with the subsidy removed at the time, maybe the country’s economy will not be in shambles like it is today because even though the subsidy has been removed, and we hear the amount of money they generated, the citizens are being made to cough out the money they do not have and spend all their life savings on food because even though the country is trillion dollars rich in the big 2025, the citizens are penny poor.