Festus Keyamo, a former Minister of State under ex-President Muhammadu Buhari has claimed that President Bola Tinubu did not remove fuel subsidy. He made the claim in a Twitter post. According to Chief Spokesman for the All Progressives Congress Presidential Campaign, a section of the media is “mischievously twisting the narrative to read that Tinubu’s government has removed subsidy,” despite President Tinubu proclaiming that subsidy was gone while giving his inaugural speech on May 29. Keyamo, who is also a former Minister of State for Labour, rather said that Tinubu’s administration only inherited a regime where there was no provision for subsidy in the 2023 Appropriation Act beginning June 2023 and the Petroleum Industry Act, which is now extant, has no provision for subsidy. In a series of tweets on his official handle, @fkeyamo, he said, “A section of the Press is mischievously twisting the narrative to read that Tinubu’s government has removed subsidy. That is not correct. Tinubu’s govt has merely inherited a regime where there was no provision for subsidy in the 2023 Appropriation Act as of June 2023 and the Petroleum Industry Act which is now extant has no provision for subsidy.“President Tinubu merely acknowledged this state of affairs in his inaugural speech at the Eagle Square.“So, any advocate of subsidy should convince the Nigerian people why President Tinubu should start on a note of illegality by promising to reintroduce something which the law has taken away. They should also convince the Nigerian people why President Tinubu should embark on a present illegality that gulped $10 billion of our scarce or unavailable resources in 2022 alone.” He added that those claiming to defend the rights or welfare of workers should convince the Nigerian people that the $10 billion injected into the economy annually will not jumpstart the economy enough to create massive jobs and even increase the same minimum wage they complain about.
