.Urges Tinubu not to give 100 percent of earnings to states
By Omeiza Ajayi
ABUJA: A chieftain of the ruling All Progressives Congress APC and Executive Director, Estate Services at the Federal Housing Authority FHA, Arc. Ezekiel Nya-Etok, has told the Presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress ADC, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar that President Bola Tinubu is not implementing his subsidy blueprint, saying the ideas the president is executing came from a meeting held over a year ago.
Nya-Etok also urged President Tinubu not to hand all the earnings from the removal of fuel subsidy to state governments when he returns for a second term.
Referring to Atiku, Nya-Etok said; “What makes you think that that is your original idea? I can tell you of a meeting we had over a year ago, where we mapped out alternatives, possibilities, and he (Tinubu) is executing them one by one,” Nya-Etok said in an interview with Vanguard on Thursday in Abuja.
He was responding to Atiku’s claim that the president had copied a section of his proposed fuel subsidy model. Nya-Etok said the claim amounted to an endorsement of Tinubu. “The day I heard that statement, I smiled. What you are saying is that the president listens and also is willing to adjust where he believes.”
He however challenged Atiku’s claim to authorship. “What makes you think that you didn’t hear something that we discussed in that meeting, and then started to run with it, and today you claim it to be your own idea?”, he queried.
Nya-Etok added that nobody could claim a monopoly on ideas, recalling that the Bible says that there is nothing new under the heavens. “So that idea that you think is your own might have been something you heard somewhere”.
He said the president had no reason to reject an idea because a rival had voiced it. “If I was Mr. President, am I going to say, ‘Ah, Atiku has said it, oh, so I will not do it, so that they won’t think that I have copied him?’ That’s childish. It also means we have a president that is not dogmatic, who says ‘My way or the highway.’ A mature person will do it, and even give you credit, if the person actually copied your ideas”, Nya-Etok said.
On the amount of subsidy earnings being pumped into the states by the president, Nya-Etok said; “Some of us are still telling him, ‘Sir, when you come back, please don’t give all the money to governors again.’ Let us try and do this method. And he is listening”.
He said the president’s reasoning was that governors know their people’s problems better. “It makes more sense for me to give this money to the man who is closer to the people to be able to do the work,” Nya-Etok said, recounting the president’s explanation.
He proposed another option for the president, saying; “In my personal opinion, maybe we would have given them 70% to solve these problems, and the other 30% we keep it as a joint operation account, escrow,” he said.
The joint account, he explained, would fund specific priorities. “We say we are going to attack social housing, we are going to attack mass transportation, we’re going to attack primary healthcare, we are going to attack insecurity or education.”
Nya-Etok did not call for subsidy to return. He said the beneficiaries of subsidy were not the poor. “You are not subsidizing the poor, you are subsidizing us. I have several V6, V8 vehicles. The fuel that I alone consume, my whole village does not consume.”
He said the money should go into interventions that reach poor Nigerians. “Mass transportation. The rich man does not go on mass transportation. For instance, social housing, those are the things that benefit the poor.”
On the president’s willingness to listen, he said: “It gives me courage that if it pleases God and he comes back second term, that this 70 – 30 percent sharing formula that some of us are proposing, he might adopt it.”
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