Immediate past governor of Ekiti State, Kayode Fayemi, has said protests that greeted the removal of fuel subsidy during the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan in 2012 were political.
Fayemi stated this while presenting his keynote address at a national dialogue organised to celebrate the 60th birthday of founding National Secretary of Alliance for Democracy (AD) and Fellow, Abuja School of Social and Political Thought, Prof. Udenta Udenta, in Abuja, yesterday.
The event, which also witnessed the unveiling of 21 books written by Udenta, was attended by Jonathan; a former Minister of Education, Oby Ezekwesili; a former Minister of Aviation, Osita Chidoka, and others.
On January 1, 2012, Jonathan had announced removal of fuel subsidy, adjusting the pump price of petrol from N65 per litre to N141: a move that sparked mass protests, known as ‘Occupy Nigeria’, across major cities of the country. The price was later adjusted to N97 after more than a week of demonstrations. In 2015, it was further reduced to N87.
Jonathan faced intense backlash, especially from leaders of the All Progressives Congress (APC) who were then in different opposition parties, including the defunct Action Congress of Nigeria, All Nigeria Peoples Party, and All Progressive Grand Alliance.
Fayemi, while condemning the winner-takes-all style in Nigerian democracy, said challenges facing the nation today cannot be solved unless the country embraces proportional representation, where spoils of elections are shared between contestants.
He said: “What we need is alternative politics. And my own notion of alternative politics is that you can’t have 35 per cent of the vote and take 100 per cent. It won’t work. We must look at proportional representation, so that the party that is said to have 21 per cent of the vote will have 21 per cent of the government. Adversarial politics brings division and enmity.
“All political parties in the country agreed and they even put it in their manifesto that the subsidy must be removed. We all said the subsidy must be removed. But we, in ACN, at the time, in 2012, we knew the truth. But it was all politics.”
(The Guardian)
