I took this picture on my way to Usman Danfodio University Sokoto, between the main gate and the campus, to help set up the electronics lab there a few years ago, before the age of insecurity in Nigeria! And now that importing buses, trains, boats, etc could be challenging due to exchange rate paralysis, do we create a national policy on breeding camels? That would be a major import substitution strategy!
Seriously, I maintain my position: Nigeria’s problem is not fuel subsidy. Our challenge is the corruption within fuel subsidies. We must not necessarily eliminate ALL fuel subsidies when we could have focused on killing corruption which makes the subsidy sub-optimal. We must manage this double whammy of removing fuel subsidy and floating Naira urgently.
Nigeria’s fuel subsidy problem is that it was designed to feed corruption (you can photoshop invoices and the government will keep paying you because you have one special connection in Abuja). In my book, Nanotechnology and Microelectronics, which received a Book of the Year award from IGI Global, and upon which I received an invitation from Harvard Business Review, I explained how nations drive technology growth, looking at 2,000 years of data.
The US postal service has not made a single profit in the last 20 years. That is a massive subsidy to improve the supply chain, across America, by making sure commerce works. But they’re smart: the money used to subsidize post office is recovered when profits of companies which depend on the postal system are taxed. Provided there is no corruption, the government has no need to turn the post office into a direct profit-making machine. Recently, the government tried to clean the books, and even after, the postal service still recorded red! That subsidy is a platform strategy as we do in startups.
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