The Emir of Kano, Muhammad Sanusi II, has said Nigeria’s current economic hardship is a result of the country’s failure to remove fuel subsidy more than a decade ago.
Sanusi, who is also a former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), made this known on Tuesday while speaking at the Oxford Global Think Tank Leadership Conference in the United Kingdom.
He said that if the government of former President Goodluck Jonathan had succeeded in removing fuel subsidy in 2011, Nigeria would have avoided the severe inflation and economic crisis it is facing today.
“If Nigerians had allowed the Jonathan government to remove the subsidy in 2011, there would have been pain,” Sanusi said. “But that pain would have been a very tiny fraction of what we are facing today. This is the cost of the delay.”
According to him, the CBN had conducted a detailed analysis at the time and projected that inflation would not have gone beyond 30 percent if the policy had been implemented then.
“At that time, we worked out the numbers in the Central Bank,” he said. “I stood up and put my credibility on the line and said, remove the subsidy today. Inflation moves up from 11 percent to 13 percent, I will bring it down in a year. We would not have had 30-something percent inflation.”
Sanusi argued that the country is now suffering the consequences of postponing difficult but necessary reforms. He said political leaders in the past avoided making hard economic decisions because they feared public backlash, which only made the problem worse over time.
“What we are going through today is the price of delay. The longer you postpone a necessary reform, the higher the cost becomes,” he said.
Fuel subsidy has been one of Nigeria’s most controversial economic policies for decades. It was first introduced to cushion the impact of high global oil prices on local consumers by keeping petrol prices artificially low.
However, economists have long argued that the policy mainly benefits fuel importers and smugglers rather than ordinary Nigerians. The system has also been riddled with corruption, with billions of naira allegedly lost to fraudulent claims and inflated import figures.
In 2012, the Jonathan administration attempted to remove the subsidy, citing the huge financial burden on government resources. But widespread protests organised by labour unions and civil society groups forced the government to reverse the decision.
According to official reports, the Nigerian government spent more than ₦4 trillion on fuel subsidy payments in 2022 alone — a figure that experts say could have been used to improve infrastructure, education, and healthcare.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu ended the fuel subsidy on May 29, 2023, during his inaugural speech, declaring that “the subsidy is gone.” The move led to an immediate rise in petrol prices, triggering inflation and public frustration.
While many Nigerians have criticised the policy for worsening living conditions, the government and financial experts maintain that subsidy removal was necessary to stabilise the economy in the long run.
Sanusi, in his remarks, supported the move, noting that while the pain is currently severe, the policy was inevitable. He warned that if Nigeria continues to shy away from difficult reforms, future generations will face even greater hardship.
“The removal should have happened over ten years ago,” he said. “We cannot keep running away from the truth. Every delay adds to the suffering of the people.”
