We have been able to quietly remove electricity subsidy, Fuel subsidy to follow – FG

Minister of Finance, Mrs Zainab Ahmed, has disclosed that the Federal Government has quietly removed subsidy on electricity tariff.

She made this known on Thursday at a virtual meeting of African Finance Ministers and the International Monetary Fund, themed: ‘The political economy of fiscal reforms’. Ahmed said the amendment of the budget was ongoing to accommodate the incremental removal of fuel subsidy.

“We are cleaning up our subsidies. We had a setback; we were to remove fuel subsidy by July this year but there was a lot of pushback from the polity. We have elections coming and because of the hardship that companies and citizens went through during the COVID-19 pandemic, we just felt that the time was not right, so we pulled back on that, she said

“But we have been able to quietly implement subsidy removal in the electricity sector and as we speak, we don’t have subsidies in the electricity sector. We did that incrementally over time by carefully adjusting the prices at some levels while holding the lower levels down.