The 2023 presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Dumebi Kachikwu, has said that if elected in 2027, he will review key economic policies of President Bola Tinubu’s administration, including the removal of fuel subsidy.
In an interview with Vanguard, Kachikwu argued that subsidy in itself is not a bad policy and that poor Nigerians should not be made to “pay the price of our inefficiencies or our inability to manage a subsidy system.”
He maintained that rather than abolish the scheme, the government should have gone after those who abused it. “The right thing is to prosecute them to the full extent of the law and bring sanity into the system,” he said.
Kachikwu also insisted that President Tinubu did not actually remove the subsidy on the day of his inauguration, stressing that the policy had already been scrapped by the Buhari administration through its budget decisions.
“He didn’t remove the fuel subsidy. We must be careful about saying that the President removed fuel subsidy on the day of inauguration. Buhari had already removed it by not making any provision for it in the budget. Tinubu only made the announcement when he found out there was no provision,” Kachikwu explained.
According to him, “a lot of people rightfully or wrongfully believe that Tinubu was the one that removed subsidy. No, President Buhari didn’t provide for subsidy.”
