The President of the Nigerian Association of Miners (MAN), Sani Shehu, has described the unprecedented removal of fuel subsidy by the federal government on January 1, 2012, as radical and sudden.
The President, who spoke in an exclusive telephone interview with LEADERSHIP yesterday, said the sudden removal of the fuel subsidy was painful as it would cause lots of hardship for the Nigerian people and wished it had been done gradually.
“I wish it was not as radical as that”, he noted .
He further lamented the poor state of the solid mineral sector? and said the sector could have provided alternative public funds to oil if well managed.
“If government had invested in the sector in the past, the government would have had alternative source of funds instead of depending on oil, because the truth is the money generated from oil cannot take care of government expenses and the nation at large,” he stated.
Shehu said that stakeholders had been urging government to develop the solid mineral sector without success, and averred that if government had developed the solid minerals as well as other sectors, it would have been enjoying the profit, instead of taking this desperate and regrettable measures of removing oil subsidy.
Stressing the need to develop the mineral sector, he said: “Rather than developing the sector, the annual allocation to the sector was declining yearly which makes one wonder if government is ready to create alternative funding to oil.”
He asserted that despite the hardship of the subsidy removal, the Nigerian miners were willing to support any policy taken by government for the development of the nation.