Written by Ademola Oni and Sunday Aborisade
Pastor Tunde BakareFileThe Serving Overseer, The Latter Rain Assembly, Pastor Tunde Bakare, has said President Goodluck Jonathan is calling on Nigerians to embark on “mass revolt” against his government through his insistence to remove fuel subsidy.
Speaking in a special broadcast titled the Simple Arithmetic of Fuel Subsidy in his Lagos church on Sunday, Bakare noted that “Jonathan was brought in by mass revolt” and was not immune to the same.
The cleric, who was the vice-presidential candidate for the Congress for Progressive Change in the April election, said he was not speaking as a politician but as a servant of God to warn the President against taking an anti-people policy.
He said, “Don’t forget that he (Jonathan) was brought in by a mass revolt when a cabal held the nation hostage and would not allow the rule of law to prevail. We went to the streets to register our grievances and the people prevailed. In the same vein, we are going on a mass revolt if the so-called fuel subsidy is removed.”
Giving an analysis of how crude oil is refined and sold at filling stations, Bakare submitted that Nigerians should be paying N33 per litre instead of the current N65.
He said, “What Nigerians are paying for is the inefficiency and pathological laziness of the government and not subsidy on fuel that is widely bandied about. What Nigerians are paying for is kleptomania in government; it is the cost of alternative importation of fuel. Government should stop using the weapon of mass deception to deceive the people.”
He accused some aides to Jonathan of pushing the man against Nigerians, adding that the President was about to set the people against himself if he heeded to his advisers to remove fuel subsidy.
Bakare refused to say what form of mass revolt he hoped to set against the President, but explained that Nigerians should wait for “Jonathan to cut off his own head” to know what would happen.
“Just wait and see what will happen; just let him go ahead and take such step and see that the leaders should serve the people not the other way round,” said the pastor at a press conference after the church service.
Meanwhile, former Minister of Defence, Mr. Adetokunbo Kayode, has said that the late President Umaru Yar’Adua would have removed the subsidy on petroleum products since 2009 if not for his ill-health and eventual death.
Kayode, who spoke with journalists shortly after he was installed the Baba Ijo of St. James’s Anglican Church, Ikaram-Akoko, Ondo State, said some committees were set up at that period to provide palliative measures that would arrest the effects of the removal.
SOURCE: Punch Newspaper, 20 December 2011. http://www.punchng.com
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