Going by the commitment of a General Buhari led government, petrol subsidy removal will only remove the fraud being perpetrated by the oil marketers in the Petroleum industry, not necessarily lead to an increase in the price of the product at the pumps.

In the words of the former CBN Governor himself who was one of those championing the petrol subsidy removal,

"Oil Marketers bring in 2 vessels of petrol, and they claim 20 vessels, and they are paid, no checks, no inspection. The same oil marketers, after collecting subsidy for the inflated numbers, still divert the product to neighboring countries, to sell at higher market prices".

This means that the current 2 trillion plus being paid to subsidy cabals by the present government, in reality, may just be less than 100 billion naira annually if the frauds are eliminated. At that rate, removal of the subsidy will have little or no effect on the price of the product if we take into account that other bottlenecks will be checkmated, such as bribing of port authorities, unnecessary and intended delays of imported petroleum products at the ports resulting in excessive demurrage among other frauds being perpetrated by the NNPC, PPPRA etc.

Removal of petrol subsidy is something that must be done, its a question of what the effect would be on the Nigerian people. Nigerians did not trust the Jonathan led government to remove the subsidy due to the excessive unchecked fraud in the petrol industry and inability of the government to fight the fraud in the system, plus the question of how the funds recovered from the subsidy removal would be used.

- SocialMediaMan