By Farooq A. Kperogi

It’s either President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his inner circle didn’t read my April 29 column titled “Six Agenda Items for Tinubu’s Success” or they did but dismissed it as the impractical, high-flown, indulgent musings of an idealistic diasporan Nigerian. The fifth item on my list concerned petrol price hikes amid the current agonizingly biting poverty in the land.
But what’s wrong with “subsidy”? At its root, subsidy, derived from Anglo-Norman French subsidie (ultimately from Latin subsidium), means “assistance.” In modern usage, it means “a sum of money granted by the government or a public body to assist an industry or business so that the price of a commodity or service may remain low or competitive.” According to Investopia.com, “subsidy is usually given to remove some type of burden and is often considered to be in the interest of the public.” What’s wrong with that?

Up until Muhammadu Buhari came to power, “subsidy” used to be a positive word in Nigeria. In fact, during the 2012 mass revolt against petrol price increase, a protester in Kano inscribed these pithy, profound words on the back of his shirt: “Subsidy is my soul.”

Of course, subsidies are the soul of poor, struggling people, not just in Nigeria but all over the world. Every government in the world, especially in the West, subsidizes basic goods, including petrol and agricultural products.

One of the sneaky ways Nigerian political elites hoodwink people into thinking that subsidies are bad for them is to associate subsidies with corruption. But that’s a false association. There is nothing in subsidies in and of themselves that makes them corrupt. Corruption is incidental to subsidies and can be eliminated if there’s a will to do so.

Jettisoning subsidies because it is riddled with corruption is similar to the proverbial throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Any government that can’t eliminate corruption and ensure that people who need subsidies get them has no reason to exist. But, apparently, many Nigerians think otherwise. So, let’s see how, to quote J.M Keynes, “the nastiest motives of the nastiest men somehow or other work for the best results in the best of all possible worlds.”

Source: https://www.farooqkperogi.com/2023/06/president-tinubu-and-dangers-of-subsidy.html?m=1