As the Federal Government has approved five billion naira for each state to enable them to procure food items for distribution to the poor in the country following the high cost of food items and petrol due to the removal of subsidy on the commodity, a public affairs analyst Dr. Williams Wodi questioned how the 5 billion naira given to state will be distributed in different state. Dr. Wodi told our reporters that the federal government did not plan on how to lessen the burden on Nigerians before removing the subsidy on petrol. Stating that this is not how to run a holistic economic system.
He further stressed that before the subsidy removal, the president should have put things in place. The palliative been planned and executed at the state level before the announcement but now it is quite difficult to cut off the sufferings of the people.
Dr. Wodi further asked “From where will they procure the food items and with what logistic arrangements have they put in place? How do we identify who the poor are and what parameters? Is there any database from which we can now identify the poor?”
The former spokesperson of the University of Port Harcourt Dr. Williams Wodi said one of the many problems is that Nigeria is not a producing nation. He explained that less than two hundred people in this country are speculating and buying up dollars. The more dollars they put into the economy from the Ministry of Finance and Central Bank of Nigeria the less than two hundred people buy up the dollars and stock them to be resold at the appropriate rate at the appropriate time.
He said this is the problem because Nigeria is not producing but consuming economy. He said “If you are not producing, you can not sell anything and if you can not sell anything, you can not raise foreign exchange and if you can not raise foreign exchange, your naira will suffer devaluation, the way we have seen it right now, overflow to the dollar. These are the problem we face. Over 90% of budgetary allocation currently goes to depth servicing”
In another development, Petroleum Product Retail Outlet Owners Association says they do not believe that the federal government will again increase the pump price of petrol. The National Chairman of the association Gallis Harry in an interview with our reporters asked the public to ignore speculation over an increment in the pump price of petrol. He also cautioned against storing petroleum products in homes.
The chairman of the Petroleum Product Retail Outlet Owners Association Gallis Harry also calls for the urgent rehabilitation of the nation’s refineries. He said the main way out is to declare a state of emergency on all the refineries in Nigeria. He said our refineries should be revived, rehabilitated, and made to become functional. Stating that now we have the Ministry of Petroleum, things must work.
