Former president Olusegun Obasanjo, has condemned the style adopted by President Bola Tinubu’s administration to remove fuel subsidy.
He noted that the incumbent government should have first considered the hardship the subsidy removal would cause people and how to ameliorate them.
Obasanjo shared his reservation during an interview with Financial Times.
“There’s a lot of work that needs to be done. Not just wake up one morning and say you removed the subsidy. Because of inflation, the subsidy that we have removed is not gone. It has come back,” the former President stressed.
He said there must be investor confidence in Nigeria, adding, “You have to go from transactional economy to transformational economy.”
Speaking on the promises that Nigerian refineries will be fixed, he he asked, “How many times have they told us that? And at what price?
“Those problems, as far as the government refineries are concerned, have never gone away. They have even increased. So if you have a problem like that and that problem is not removed then you aren’t going anywhere.”
Obasanjo expressed concern over youths’ restiveness caused by unemployment, fearing that Nigeria might be sitting on a keg of gunpowder.
“Our youth are restive. And they are restive because they have no skill. They have no empowerment. They have no employment. We are all sitting on a keg of gunpowder. And my prayer is that we will do the right thing before it’s too late,” he warned