“Do you remember Shopee? Yeah. We tried different things. We knew that, look, Nigeria has four international borders, right? And then you’re subsidizing your own fuel. You have four international borders. So your own fuel is maybe 40% lower than your four, and they’re land borders. It’s not Britain that has a sea around it.
“They’re land borders, right? So at some stage, we ended up with a consumption figure of about 65 million liters per day. We did the math. And we knew that we had like 10 million cars. What’s going on? It’s not possible. It’s just not possible.
“Then we came up with, well, we can’t remove subsidy because it’s going to affect the people negatively. Let’s put trackers on all the tankful. I remember that.
“The incentive to smuggle. So we weren’t just subsidizing Nigeria. We were subsidizing the whole West African region, which we can’t afford to do.”
She further pointed out the benefits of the subsidy removal stating “Now, that money you spend on subsidy is money you can’t spend on roads. It’s money you can’t spend on education. It’s money you can’t spend on health. And there’s nothing to show for it. So everybody knew that policy had to go.
“Now, the policy is gone, of course, there are some overspills, right? Yeah, there will be. But in the long run, Nigerians are going to be so much better off.”
