Ahead of the projected date of mid-2022 for the complete withdrawal of fuel subsidies, the Federal Government of Nigeria has planned strategies to minimize the negative impact of the removal of subsidies on the most vulnerable 40% of the population.
One of these measures would be the implementation of a monthly transportation subsidy in the form of a N5,000 cash transfer to between 30 and 40 million qualified Nigerians.
Mrs Zainab Ahmed, Minister of Finance, Budget, and National Planning, made the announcement in Abuja on Tuesday at the unveiling of the Nigeria Development Update.
According to the finance ministry, “with the expansion of social protection policies during the pandemic, the government has an opportunity to phase out subsidies such as the PMS subsidy while utilizing cash transfers to safeguard the welfare of poor and middle-class households”.
The federal government “intends to accelerate our structural reforms, particularly in the power sector, in governance, in business environment to unlock the huge potentials of the economy, scale up social safety net and deepen financial inclusion to reduce poverty and inequality gaps,” She said.
“We will carefully calibrate the sequencing of these reforms to manage their attendant political fallouts”.
Zainab Ahmed noted that government is optimistic that “the recent developments in the oil sector, such as the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) 2021, the full reactivation of the four public refineries in the country, and the completion and coming on stream of the three private refineries under construction in 2022, would significantly boost contribution from the sector to our economic growth efforts”.
