Dear Mr. President, One plus One equals Two

During the presidential media chat, Nigeria’s no. 1 citizen made a lot of pronouncements.

Yesterday in front of millions and millions of Nigerians, Mr. President admitted that the government can pay the subsidy and is in fact willing to pay the subsidy.

You might be inclined to argue that he never made such a statement and you may even have recorded the whole episode and be willing to play it back to prove it, don’t bother. You see with the Nigerian government you have to be able to read between the lines.

Mr. President did say and I quote, “if we had only two million people in Nigeria we would even give free fuel”. He did not say government would subsidize fuel but that they would indeed give free fuel.

So let us now bring Mr. President abreast of financial economics with a little Microsoft Excel wizardry. Frankly I think Mr. President should sack his entire economic team and just hire me. Send Ngozi back to the kind folk at the World Bank, tell Mr. Zoellick it was nice of him to let us have her for a few months, but we can get the transformation job done our selves. Here is why!

Two million people consuming a conservative ten liters of petrol a day at the rate of N 139 per liter in a year is approximately N 1 trillion Naira. Mr. President told us that he would give us Nigerians, if we would reduce ourselves to two million people, free fuel. Since I know 138 million people will not just get up and go to Ghana, simply because Ghana will not like to have them, let us ask Mr. President to meet us at the middle. Just use the N 1 trillion to provide subsidy for 140 million of us, we will pay our part and you also pay your part. You did say you were capable of doing so.

We were listening.