President Muhammadu Buhari may soon remove the petrol subsidy once and for all.
This came as Buhari, on Friday said that the petrol subsidy is unsustainable.
He stated this when he presented a N20.51 trillion 2023 budget proposal to the National Assembly.
Buhari said, “Petrol subsidy has been a recurring and controversial public policy issue in our country since the early eighties.
“However, its current fiscal impact has clearly shown that the policy is unsustainable. As a country, we must now confront this issue taking cognizance of the need to provide safety nets to cushion the attendant effects on some segments of society.”
Noting that discontinuing the policy is necessary for the country to manage limited resources, Mr Buhari said, “As we seek to grow our government revenues, we must also focus on the efficiency of utilization of our limited resources.”
“Critical steps we are taking include immediate implementation of additional measures towards reducing the cost of governance and the discontinuation of fuel subsidy in 2023 as announced earlier,” he added.
He, meanwhile, said that provisions would be made to ameliorate the effects of subsidy removal.
“We are however mindful of the fact that reducing government spending too drastically can be socially destabilizing, and so will continue to implement programs to support the more vulnerable segments of society,” Presidential Buhari said.