Press focuses on subsidy removal and attendant hike in fuel pump prices, others

APA – Lagos (Nigeria)
The report that the Nigeria Labour Congress on Sunday shunned a meeting called by the Federal Government to discuss the subsidy removal and the attendant hike in fuel pump prices across the country is one of the trending stories in Nigerian newspapers on Monday.
The Punch reports that the Nigeria Labour Congress on Sunday shunned a meeting called by the Federal Government to discuss the subsidy removal and the attendant hike in fuel pump prices across the country.
The union insisted that it would not hold any dialogue with the government representatives unless a legitimate team was set up.
However, the Trade Union Congress officials attended the meeting which was a follow-up to the talks held with the NLC at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, last week, which ended in a deadlock.
This is as the electricity workers vowed to join the strike and plunge the nation into a blackout in protest against the removal of fuel subsidy by the Bola Tinubu administration.
The National Treasurer of the NLC, Hakeem Ambali, confirmed the decision of the union to boycott the meeting which was a follow-up to the Wednesday meeting on the removal of subsidy.
During the meeting attended by the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele, Managing Director, Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation Limited, Mele Kyari, Dele Alake, and others, the NLC had insisted on the reversal of the fuel pump price pegged at between N488 and N540.
Following the breakdown of talks, the congress resolved at its NEC meeting held on Friday to embark on a nationwide strike.
The newspaper says that Nigeria’s electricity export crashed by $58.1m in one year amid grid collapse, The PUNCH has learnt.
Data from the Central Bank of Nigeria showed that the value of Nigeria’s electricity export was $213.66m in 2021 but dropped to $155.56m in 2022. This represents a 27 per cent drop in earnings from crude oil exports.
It also means Nigeria made $369.22m in two years from exporting its electricity.
In August last year, the Managing Director of TCN, Sule Abdulaziz, noted that Nigeria has been exporting electricity, and this provides an avenue to earn more foreign exchange for national development.
He said, “Nigeria, through TCN, had been exporting electricity to Niger, Benin, and Togo under a country-to-country arrangement.”
However, Nigeria consistently suffered the collapse of its national grid, which further affected electricity output in 2022.
The PUNCH reported last year that Nigeria’s available power generation capacity fell by 981.8 megawatts between 2015 and August 2022 despite the over N1.51tn intervention in the sector by the Federal Government since the current administration came on board in 2015.
On March 1, 2017, the Federal Government approved the sum of N701bn as a power assurance guarantee fund for the Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading Plc to pay for the electricity produced by the generation companies for the period of two years.
The Guardian reports that the upward trajectory witnessed in the country’s telecoms sector very early in the year appears not to have been sustained. By the end of April, service providers had already lost about 2.5 million voice subscribers.
The sector had ended 2022 with some 222.5 million subscribers. By January 2023, subscribers increased by 3.6 million new users to 226.2 million. In February, it leaped slightly to 227.1 million.
It, however, fell to 226.2 million in March, where about 1.5 million Subscriber Identification Module (SIM) cards became inactive. The downward trend went further in April, with the plunge hitting 223.7 million.
The drop also impacted negatively the country’s teledensity, which fell from 118.4 per cent in March to 117.1 per cent by April ending. Teledensity is the number of telephone connections per 100 people in a specified geographic area. It is often used to compare the level of access to voice and data communications services between metropolitan and rural areas, or between one country and another.
In the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) subscription statistics (April edition), released at the weekend, the drop also impacted broadband connectivity.
Penetration in the broadband segment went down from 48.21 per cent in March to 48.14 per cent. Some 146,287 customers in that sub-sector didn’t utilise the service in the period under review. Specifically, the number went from 92 million users in March to 91.8 million by April ending.
However, Internet users on the narrow band (GSM) platform increased by 678,485, where operators moved from 156.9 million in March to 157.6 million by April.
Largely, market dominance still remained with MTN, which has 39.7 per cent penetration and 88.6 million users. Globacom is second with 60.9 million users and 27.3 per cent market share. In third position is Airtel, which services 60.3 million customers and boasts of a market reach of 27 per cent. 9mobile, which in the last minutes of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration got a N70 billion spectrum fees waiver, has 13.4 million users and six per cent penetration.
On what may have caused the drop in number of users, recall that Nigeria was hit by a cash crunch between February and March 2023. This followed Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) policies on naira redesign and cash withdrawal limit, aimed at boosting the country’s cashless policy.
The newspaper says that the premium motor spirit (PMS) subsidy removal offers Nigeria the rare strength to crawl back from the fiscal cliff, but whether the imminent doomsday is only shifted miles away or completely aborted may not only depend on how the current transition is managed but also the response of critical stakeholders to the decision.
To suggest that the country has been dancing around the abyss in the past few days is to discount the severity of the challenges. Of course, the push-and-pull narrative about subsidy removal had been elevated to a popular discourse in the past two decades or so. But never has the waste and corruption associated with it pushed the economy to its current bend-or-break position.
And the red figures as well as headshaking facts are now in the open. Volumes of books could be written about the missed opportunities but nothing calls for deep-thinking and audacious action than the current sorrowful state of public finances, poor infrastructure spending and mounting liabilities.
The argument could continue endlessly on whether the government should have toed its path in clotting the open wound subsidy and all its trappings have assumed or endure the bleeding a little longer. But it is what it is – the country is on life support and does not have the luxury of time to tarry before proceeding with the much-needed surgical operation.
First, the recent steep increase in deficits amid dissaving is a major concern. As at the end of April, the outstanding on the Excess Crude Account (ECA), according to the Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC), was $0.475 million, 98 per cent steep fall from $2.1 billion in the coffer about less than a decade ago.
GIK/APA