Gbenga Noble

📌Please watch Senegal closely this week. That was almost us. Their government hid how much they owed. When the truth came out, the lenders shut the door. Then oil prices jumped in February and the fuel subsidy bill exploded past anything they had planned for. Their finance minister asked to raise pump prices so the burden could be shared. He was told no. It did not matter. The bill came anyway. Today they are cutting the same subsidy they refused to touch. Only now the IMF is in the room, and Dakar no longer decides the pace. Here is the part that should sober every Nigerian. Their own government has admitted that the richest households were swallowing most of that subsidy money. Not the poor. The rich. The same thing we were told for years about ours, and the same thing many of us refused to believe. Now put Nigeria in that chair. Petrol subsidy was draining us by trillions every year when oil was calm. Picture February this year, oil above a hundred dollars, and Nigeria still paying subsidy. Where would that money have come from? Who would have lent it to us? We would not be negotiating today. We would be taking instructions. President Tinubu ended it in his first hour in office. He carried the anger himself so that Nigeria would still be the one making its own decisions three years later. And the money came back. Trillions have gone into the Federation Account since then, and your own state and local government took the larger share of it. The July allocation alone was almost four times what was being shared the month before the reform. Senegal is doing the hard thing now, but somebody else chose the day for them. We chose our own day and that is the whole difference. #KemKem