In his Facebook page,Reno Omokri speaks about Paul Okoye(P-Square) position on hike in Petrol price.
“People like Paul Okoye may mean well, but they are not sufficiently aware of the economics of scale that drive commodity prices. That is why he says the President should reduce petrol price to ₦450 if he truly loves Nigeria.”
According to Omokri,”Paul Okoye sells music. Is he prepared to slash the cost of streaming his music by half?” Then why is he asking the President to do what he, as a private citizen, cannot do and has not done? Does he not love his fans?
Some people are even prepared to take their own flesh and blood to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission if they do not see every penny of their music royalties.
Is Mr. Okoye aware that if the government artificially reduces the price of petrol, the government will have to pay refiners and importers the difference between ₦450 and the actual cost of petrol? Where will the money come from?
Nigeria is already the third most indebted country in the world to the World Bank’s International Development Association, mostly from General Buhari’s borrowings.
As it now stands, a significant portion of our nation’s revenue is going towards debt servicing and repayment.
And when you take into effect that less than 10% of Nigerians pay taxes, where will the money come from?
The only way the Federal Government can reduce the cost of petrol below the actual market price is through further borrowing or printing more Naira, which will lead to devaluation. When that happens, people will complain.
Nigeria is not an oil-rich nation. Divided by our population, our total annual income from oil and gas comes to $150 per Nigerian.
From that money, our government is meant to pay civil servants, build infrastructure, provide free education, and maintain our military and law enforcement.
Nigeria is not oil-rich at all. We are oil-poor. On a per capita basis, Ghana is more oil-rich than we are. We produce 1.5 million barrels per day for a population of 220 million people. Ghana produces 200,000 barrels per day for a population of 32 million.
And it is not that we do not have the capacity to pay our taxes. We do. We just choose not to. Nigerians are more faithful at paying tithes to churches than taxes to the government. Yet, the Nigerian government is more transparent with how they spend your tax Naira than these churches.
The government publishes its revenue, they also have a budget, and there is the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which guides spending. There is also the Freedom of Information Act, which allows citizens to scrutinise government spending. How many churches have such checks and balances? Yet, we see how extravagantly their pastors live.
For Paul Okoye and others like him to understand how difficult it is to bring form petrol price, let them Tahoe the Dangote Refinery for example.
The Dangote Refinery is sold Nigerian crude oil in Naira at a slight discount. Yet, this commercially run refinery is unlikely to sell petrol cheaper than the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation PLC does.
If it were as easy as Paul Okoye demands, would Dangote not do it?
Even in oil-producing countries, like the United States, where 59% of their citizens pay taxes, they have not reduced fuel costs to ₦450. How much less in Nigeria, where less than 10% of us pay taxes?
Nigerians want to live at the expense of the state forgetting that the state has to live at the expense of the people or it will collapse, like the Soviet Union in 1991.