By Sule Aliyu Bauçhi
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Yusuf Maitama Tuggar has urged Nigerians not to lose faith in the present administration of President Bola Tinubu because of the hardship they are currently facing in the country, assuring that there is going to be light at the end of the tunnel.
Fielding questions from journalists during an interactive session held at the Tuggar Foundation office Bauchi, Ambassador Tuggar noted that Nigeria is not the only country facing hardship current, but is a situation that has affected other parts of the world.
According to him, the policies of the past administration contributed greatly to the hardship in the country, adding that the 2008 global financial meltdown followed by other unavoidable calamities that affected the world such as the Coronavirus pandemic where borders were closed and movements of goods and services came to a halt as well as the loss of lives affected the cost of living.
“Nigerians over the years have been importing petrol, we had four refineries, two were built in the 1960s in Port Harcourt, we have the Kaduna and the Warri Refinery.These refineries were built when Nigeria population was much smaller than what it is today.Today we have a population of 220 million, which means the consumption of petrol has gone up, but we have not over the years been expanding our refining capacity, which made us to be importing more petrol as the price was going up globally”
“The other issue is course the exchange rate which was equally affected by the subsidy.If we are subsidizing consumption and not subsidizing production because what we ought to be doing over those years was to be subsidizing production and industries so that we can prosper, but unfortunately, a lot of money was going into subsidizing the importation of petroleum product”
“When President Tinubu came into office he made the decision to institute macro economic reforms, even if we decided not to make those reforms, we could no longer afford to be buying expensive petrol that we could be using on a daily basis.So the president embark on the reforms which meant that we would no longer be subsidizing the importation of petrol”
Tuggar said there were different exchange rates for different purposes which created room for arbitrary practices.
“Some people were getting allocation of foreign exchange of dollars which they will not use to import the raw materials that industries require but instead will sell it in the market and just put the money in their pocket”
So President Tinubu closed the exchange rate so that we will have one exchange rate.While all this was going on, the activities of crypto currency traders were undermining the system.There was in particular a crypto currency exchange that was taking advantage of these reforms and was using the opportunity to launder money”
“People who had stolen money and had kept it here in Nigeria were using crypto currency to take the money out, which meant that they were undermining the reforms that the Tinubu administration was carrying out and that of course led to further hardship”
“That is why some of the individuals that were involved in these nefarious activities or representatives of the crypto currencies traders have been arrested and have been charged to court”
The minister explained that the President has been doing a lot to reduce the current hardships in the country with distribution of palliatives to citizens and fertilizer, inputs, seedlings, pesticides and so forth to farmers.
He stated that the reforms was something that the current administration had to do to safeguard the future of the country.
“We are beginning to feel the impact, though it is slow, but we have to remember that Nigeria is not in isolation.This hardship is taking place all over the world so we will continue to remain steadfast” Tuggar concluded.
