The Fuel Subsidy Bogey

_B. Omisore
Fellow Nigerians, let us continue to educate and enlighten ourselves as we press ahead in this struggle. Be rest assured that what you’re fighting against is a just cause, a fight for your life and the future of your children. You cannot afford to stand aloof or lose this fight. Though the forces arrayed against us be formidable and will not give up easily, there is an assured victory in collective will of a determined people . Your continued poverty is their own gain and no slave master ever grants liberty to his captive without a fight. You must be prepared to fight, or stay in servitude for as long you live. Let us fight this one till we emancipate ourselves from the bondage of slave masters and oppressors – old and new.

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As we prepare ourselves and launch out, we must beware of the agents of distraction and saboteurs been dispatched by our oppressors to truncate and defeat our just cause. They will not only confront us with their goons to shoot, arm, and kill us (as they’re already doing) in order to silence the voice of dissent, they will also seek to engage and confuse our minds. Their minions have already been dispatched to infiltrate us and advance subtle arguments on the reasonability or desirability of this fuel subsidy removal. It is not only a battle of wills, but also a contest of ideas, and this is why it has become imperative to equip ourselves and engage them on both, and all fronts.

What many of us understand with absolute clarity, is that this policy is a ready recipe for the further impoverishment of Nigerians, with no countervailing formula to make life any better. Their proposed investment in infrastructure from the accrued saving is an oft repeated story to hoodwink us. Except you are in the club of the oppressors, or lucky to find your way into their fold, it is a wholesale, unsubsidized suffering and hardship that lies ahead. This much everyone understands. What we need to understand, with the same amount of clarity, is what the dialectics of this fuel subsidy thing are, and whether there is any justification behind removing it and heaping the burden on you and me.

Here are the things we know, or need to know:

1. Fuel subsidy is a phantom; there is no subsidy in the real sense. A phantom is what you are persuaded of seeing, or hearing, or sensing, but is actually unreal. It is not there. It is a lie.
2. Our refineries have the capacity to refine the quantity of oil that we need for local consumption but they are being deliberately sabotaged by the cabal to make room for their subsidy.
3. Some of the oil they are claiming subsidy on are actually refined in Nigeria!
4. It is our crude oil they take abroad to refine, bring back home, claim subsidy on, and then divert more than half of it to the neighboring countries to sell at more than twice the prevailing price.
5. The actual cost of refining a liter of our oil abroad is less than the N65 old price they were actually selling to us in the first place
6. As of today, we do not know exactly how many barrels of oil we pump everyday because Goodluck Jonathan and his cohorts are allocated some of the barrels, which are refined for them and on which they collect subsidy. Obasanjo also did the same while in office.
7. The subsidy they pay out cannot even be matched to an exact volume of oil that is imported at any time.
8. With the removal of subsidy, the cabal in charge of fuel importation (with Goodluck Jonathan at the top) now shifts the burden of oil the wheel of corruption on everyone, except the beneficiaries within the cabal.
9. With the removal of fuel subsidy, the cabal looses nothing, the loser is you and I who bear their burden and pain
10. The burden is being shifted to you and I because Jonathan and his friends have drained the treasury and have no scruples targeting our meager means of livelihood to augment their cravings for more.
11. The subsidy regime, in the real sense, is a fraud, a house of monumental corruption!
12. Fuel subsidy is nothing but grand larceny of sickening proportions.

No matter how else they seek to confuse you, you must stick to these realities and resist every attempt at robbing you of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Jonathan and his band of thieves must not only be pressured to reverse this evil, it is also high time the whole paradigm shifted. Gridluck Jonathan and his friends are 419ers and this struggle must draw the final curtain on their evil business. We either make it happen now, or take delivery of utter ruins.

Godspeed Nigerians!