Ndubuisi Orji, Abuja
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), yesterday, has described the fuel subsidy regime under President Muhammadu Buhari as monumental fraud.
The PDP in statement by Kola Ologbondiyan challenged government officials to tell the truth about how trillions of naira claimed to have been paid as subsidy was allegedly cornered by a cabal in the Presidency.
It described recent declaration by the Group Managing Director, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Mele Kyari, that there will be no more fuel subsidy and under-recovery as dramatic.
“If the Federal Government is running away from its subsidy policy, the substantive Minister of Petroleum Resources, President Buhari or his minister of state, Timi Sylva, should muster the courage to announce this to Nigerians through a policy statement. Our party holds that this sudden announcement of an end to fuel subsidy and commencement of a deregulation regime of the oil sector is a desperate step by the Buhari administration to stave off an investigation into the siphoning of trillions of naira by APC leaders using phoney subsidy claims.
“It would be recalled that in his bid to smear the PDP, President Buhari, while leading the agitation against the decision by the PDP administration to deregulate the oil sector in 2012, declared that fuel subsidy does not exist. He had called the subsidy regime and its operators a fraud.
“Rather than riding on this declaration on assumption of office, the Buhari Presidency provided official cover for the cabal and APC leaders to use his ascendancy to power to engage in underhand dealings, plunder our nation’s subsidy resources, pillaged trillions of naira from the oil cashbox, only to now turn around to announce an end to subsidy, seeing that there is nothing left to steal with the current international price crash.
“We ask, could this be the reason behind Mr. President’s inability to make any concrete statement on the exposed subsidy scam under his administration in the last five years?
“Could it also be the reason the oil subsidy, which Nigerians where enjoying under the PDP, was adjudged a fraud but suddenly ceased to be a fraud from 2015 till Monday, even when Nigerians no longer enjoyed any benefit from the payout within this period? Nigerians now know the reason the APC administration had refused to allow for an independent inquest into the alleged N1.4 trillion oil subsidy sleaze through which certain APC leaders were benefiting from alleged N58 hidden toll per litre which Nigerians were forced to bear for years, after fuel price was increased by the APC administration from PDP’s subsidised cost of N87 to N145 per litre.”