The presidential candidate of the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC), Peter Obi, says the mismanagement of fuel subsidy proceeds should not be the reason to return the subsidy.
Obi said this on Monday during a panel session at the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) Annual General Conference.
“Well, I subscribe, and I maintain that you need to remove subsidy. Mismanagement of the proceeds should not be the reason for not removing it,” he said at the event in Port Harcourt, Rivers State.
“What we should have done is that when we remove subsidy, we would have given the people an alternative usage for the subsidy. What we have today is that that removal and attendant resources being recovered are also being mismanaged and stolen.”
According to Obi, proceeds from subsidy removal should be ploughed back into areas such as healthcare.
“For example, we have received, according to them [the Federal Government], N16 trillion. I said it before; go to my manifesto and see where I said I would remove subsidy.
“We’ll do it in an organized manner, and whatever we recover will be invested appropriately, and I’ll just give you an example because we have no time.”
“So it’s what you use the money for that is the problem,” the former Anambra State governor told the gathering in the coastal state. “We will use the money in an organised manner, or you save it. If they had saved the money and decided to do like any other country, we would have had $10 billion added to the sovereign wealth fund, which, if you add it today, will be getting about $10 billion every month, which we can use for a purpose.”
Obi also spoke about an opposition coalition but insisted that he is only interested in one that has the interest of the Nigerian people at heart.
