MUCH ADO ABOUT GEJ'S "SUREISH" COMMENTS:A DEARTH OF COMMON SENSE?

NIGERIA’S SURE PROGRAM NO LONGER REALISTIC.” – PRESIDENT JONATHAN; By this statement that has dominated the headlines of main stream and new media in the last couple of hours and the attendant reactions that it has so far elicited, some people; going by their posts on Social Media; seem to have concluded that GEJ was ostensibly admitting that the whole nine yards of events surrounding the January 1^st 2012 announcement of a total removal of Fuel subsidy on PMS resulting in a new pump price of N141 and a subsequent renegotiated figure of N93 following the standoff between Government and organised Labour was an error in judgement by his administration and therefore a failure.

As the story goes, GEJ noticed that

copies of the SURE Programme document were being distributed to attendees at the 54th NEC of the PDP in Abuja; whereby in addition to directives that the copies be retrieved, he supposedly announced that the program was no longer realistic.

This whole brouhaha in my opinion is a simple case of misunderstanding stemming from words being twisted and taken out of context to simply create some sordid brew of the questionable kind that would no doubt put us all on the edge of our seats. I wonder why GEJ’S statement on the functionality of the SURE document after directing that distribution of same be discontinued  be eliciting such bad reviews; when it is in actual fact a well intentioned statement to manage the blunder committed by the "distribution agents" of the PDP, who should have certainly known better than to inappropriately circulate a document for a programme that was originally designed based on the predication of a total deregulation of the Petroleum sector and not the partial deregulation currently in practice.

One would have expected that the full text of GEJ’s comments following his directive should have sufficed to buttress the point that the document was the brunt of his “no longer realistic” comment and not the programme in itself; especially not after inaugurating the committee on the 13^th of February; hear him; “We developed this with the expectation that we were going to completely deregulate the downstream sector of the oil industry, (after) the 100 per cent removal of subsidy....We couldn’t achieve that though there was an increase in the price. I don’t want this to be distributed; it will give a wrong impression.”

It must be recalled, that following the total removal of fuel subsidy in January, the FG set up the Christopher Kolade led Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (SURE) Board with a primary mandate of overseeing and ensuring the effective and timely implementation of projects to be funded from the petroleum subsidy savings account on the premise that a total deregulation would ultimately result in the projected savings to be reinvested. This document that still exists in public domain since its release listed in great detail and sector by sector the different (short/long term)projects, interventions and palliative measures that would be initiated to improve the quality of life of Nigerians in line with the transformation agenda of the President. Allocations to the FG, State and Local Government where also listed on Pages 3 and 4 of the document.  

I wonder yet again what all the fuss is about really. It doesn’t require rocket science to know that if a programme and its mandate document was designed based on projected savings, it is only good and meet that in the event of an expected change in projected savings as a result of certain variables as in this case; whilst the primary brief/mandate may remain the same, certain adjustments would need to be made to accommodate obvious changes which would therefore render the premier document invalid.

Rather than continuously obsess about what the President meant or didn’t mean in this regard, the die is cast with the inauguration of the committee; we should therefore get busy with devising appropriate strategy to monitor and assess the activities of this committee in the coming months in line with GEJ’s appeal to all Nigerians at the inauguration of the board last Monday urging us to cooperate with the administration by moving across the country to oversee the implementation of projects and programmes of SURE.