The Chairman of the Presidential Committee on Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms, Taiwo Oyedele, has stressed the need for the government’s palliatives to focus on those in the urban poor.
Oyedele, who said this in Lagos on Monday, noted that the urban poor are the most affected by the government’s policy, which has made life almost impossible for them.
“Since fuel subsidy removal, it is a painful sacrifice that Nigerians are making… If you are an urban poor, life is almost impossible. When the subsidy was removed, the price of PMS at the pump went up by more than 200 percent. You know what happened? Traffic in Lagos disappeared.”
“One of the reasons it disappeared was because a lot of people could no longer maintain buying fuel to be on the road and then they park their cars. Do you think those are the upper-class people? No! The upper-class people will just complain briefly, they will pay and move on. They drove exactly the way they drove before, after the removal,” Oyedele said.
He further stated that the policy is necessary, but the government needs to commit every saved amount from this policy to helping those who really need it, adding that the most impacted by the subsidy removal policy are not in the villages.
“Many villages have no idea that they have removed fuel subsidy. But if you are an urban poor, you commute to work; you pay rent; you buy food. We produced our foods in the village. In other words, we must make sure that we are able to attend to these problems where it is most painful,” Oyedele said.
He further advised Nigerians to stop praying for the country’s refineries to work and should rather channel such energy into demanding their sale.
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