By Charles Adingupu
Amid the nationwide fuel scarcity trailing President Bola Tinubu’s declaration that “fuel subsidy is gone,” the Co-Founder of Sahara Group, Tonye Cole, is calling on the new administration to cater to the poor and urgently address the current “trust deficit”.
Cole, who made a live appearance on Tuesday’s episode of Channels Television’s Politics Today, argued that the subsidy removal policy stood on three legs, the first of which he said was empathy.
For the poor, he explained, “that one naira you have taken away from them means a lot to them, so you need to be empathetic.”
The entrepreneur turned politician added that studies point to “the one percent” benefitting up to six times more than the poor from subsidy.
“The next one is that you need to be transparent. So, there’s a social responsibility. They must believe that what you’re taking away, you have to be able to bring it back in another way that affects them,” he said.
“So, you take from one hand, you give in another. They must see that happen.”
In Cole’s view, the third “leg” is trust on the part of the masses, adding that “we have a trust deficit” at present.
“The main thing right now is the transparency: ‘What will happen with the money that is left coming out from subsidy? And how does it affect the common denominator of the poor man?’” he said.
The transparency as to ‘exactly what are we going to get?’ That’s the communication that would happen.”
Asked to comment on the economic impact of fuel subsidy removal on the poorest Nigerians, Cole — the 2023 Rivers State governorship candidate of Tinubu’s party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) — asked the new president to consider distributing palliatives.
About 133 million persons (or 63 percent) living in Nigeria are multidimensionally poor, according to a November 17, 2022 statement by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
“We have to make sure, as a nation, that we already have a database of the poor and you have to be able to directly impact their bottom line, their pocket,” he said.
“If you’re increasing pricing, you need to be able to give conditional cash transfers to the very, very poor, so that they don’t enter into a lower level of poverty that they cannot come out of. It’s critical that you prevent the poor from falling into deeper poverty.”
