By Idriss LAWAL
Nigeria main opposition African Democratic Congress (ADC) has hinted on plans to bring back petrol subsidy if elected into office next in the next year’s general election.
Recalled that the ruling party APC under President Bola Tinubu removed the fuel subsidy on assumption of office.
According to its spokesman Bolaji Abdullahi, fuel subsidy will be revisited and reviewed by the ADC.
The ADC’s presidential flagbearer Atiku Abubakar also promised to remove the petrol subsidy while running under the flag of PDP in the last general election.
Peter Obi of Labour Party (LP), also called subsidy payment as fraud and promised to discontinue with it if voted into office, going into the 2023 elections.
“We will revisit the issue of subsidy. We will revisit it because we are a social democratic party. Our immediate concern is how do we ease the burden on the people,” he declared.
According to him, the problem was not subsidy itself but the way it was administered.
He said: “We looked at what they have done and we said, no, this is wrong because we know that the problem is not the subsidy itself. It is the governance of the subsidy.
“The ADC is saying withdrawing subsidy from everyone is as bad as giving subsidy to everyone.”
Arguing that governments across the world still subsidise strategic sectors, he said “there is no country in the world that does not give one kind of subsidy or the other.”
He questioned why Nigerians had yet to benefit despite what he described as unprecedented government revenues, adding, “this is a government that has made more money than any other government in Nigerian history.
He also urged Nigerians not blame decades of governance failures on leaders of opposition parties, who held public offices in the past.
Abdullahi said the opposition coalition should be rated by the alternatives it is offering rather than demand apologies for the past.
But the ADC vowed yesterday to revisit the rollback if elected in 2027.
The party also defended its criticism of the continued detention of former Kaduna State Governor Nasir El-Rufai.
“What you are demanding is an inquest. I don’t think I have anything to apologise for. Personally, I don’t think I have anything to apologise for,” he said.
He maintained that although successive governments had made mistakes, the country’s problems required a fresh political direction rather than endless blame, saying, “The problems that confront us today as a people can only be solved if we embrace a new way of thinking.”
According to him, the coalition itself emerged from the recognition that Nigeria’s political culture had failed.
