The Chairman of the Presidential Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms Committee, Taiwo Oyedele, has said Nigerians should pray that the country’s refineries do not work.
Oyedele, who spoke at The Platform’s Independence Anniversary event, held in Lagos on Monday, said should Nigerian refineries produce petroleum, inefficiencies in the management might make a litre of petrol the most expensive in the world.
“Nigerians would say if only our refineries were working, then we’ll be fine. Nothing can be farther from the truth than that. In fact, Nigerians should come together and say please make sure that our refineries don’t work. We should sell them.
“The National Assembly said we have spent over N10tn maintaining our refineries even when they have not produced anything,” Oyedele said during the event tagged ‘Africa Rising Continent – Nigeria’s Strategic Role’.
“If Nigerian refineries process crude oil, unless we deal with our inefficiency, one litre of petrol will be the most expensive in the world. You would have succeeded in replacing the subsidy at the pump with subsidy of the refineries,” he added.
Delivering his speech titled ‘Making Nigeria the springboard for Africa through sound economic policies and responsible citizenship,’ the chairman said, “What is our vision? What is the Nigerian dream? Even I had to Google it, and when I did, I really couldn’t find anything.
“The closest thing I found was in the recent document called Agenda 2050, which was developed by the immediate past administration, it has the vision, the mission, and it has objectives.”
Speaking on policies that can help reform the economy, he said the naira redesign policy of the President Muhammadu Buhari-led Federal Government went wrong.
“I know most people remember monetary policies and if not for anything, the recent naira redesign reminded all of us how bad things can get when you get just one policy wrong.
“Sometimes it’s not just about the economy, activities, values and financial losses but about lives which are irreplaceable,” he said.
He identified industrial policy, environmental and energy policies, among eight others, as policies that could help reform the economy.
He said, “When the fuel subsidy was removed, the pump price of PMS went up by 200 per cent. Do 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 they parked their cars.
“Do you think those are the upper-class people? No. The upper-class people will just complain briefly and they’ll pay and still move on. They drove exactly as they drove before and after the removal. The lower and middle-class people who had Tokunbo (imported) used cars – those cars break down regularly, and they visit the vulcanisers regularly and the mechanic.
“Ssince those people are parking their vehicles at home, the vulcaniser is not finding jobs to do; so is the mechanic. It’s not just the vulcaniser, the apprentices and the family they support – life has become impossible, but we all agree it’s a necessary policy. But we need to react and respond in a way that is robust enough so we can take some of those pains off our people.”