The Emir of Kano, Muhammad Sanusi II, has said the inflation figure in the country today would have been way lower if Goodluck Jonathan had been allowed to remove fuel subsidy in 2011.
Sanusi said this on Tuesday, while addressing the Oxford Global Think Tank Leadership Conference.
The former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria(CBN) stated that Nigeria could have avoided today’s severe economic distress if the administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan had been allowed to end the subsidy.
“If Nigerians had allowed the Jonathan government to remove the subsidy in 2011, there would have been pain. But that pain would have been a very tiny fraction of what we are facing today. This is the cause of the delay,” he said.
According to him, the CBN had earlier assessed the likely impact of subsidy removal and concluded that inflation would not have exceeded 30 per cent if the policy had been implemented then.
“At that time, we worked out the numbers in the Central Bank. I stood up and put my credibility on the line and said, remove the subsidy today. Inflation moves up from 11 per cent to 13 per cent, I will bring it down in a year. We would not have had 30-something per cent inflation,” he said.
The likes of Tunde Bakare, Professor Wole Soyinka and other prominent Nigerians organised “Occupy Nigeria”, grounding economic activities for over a week, in protest against Jonathan’s administration to remove fuel subsidy.
However, President Bola Tinubu in his inaugural speech on May 29, 2023, announced that fuel subsidy was gone.
It immediately threw cost of transportation and prices of goods and services into the air, sparking the highest inflation in Nigeria’s modern history.
