The Minister of Finance, Mrs Zainab Ahmed, has stated that the Federal Government does not plan to remove fuel subsidy in the immediate future.
She made this known on Sunday while speaking at the briefing by the Nigerian delegation on the outcome of their meetings with investors and institutions at the International Monetary Fund (IMF)/World Bank meetings in Washington DC.
The IMF had advice to the federal government to remove fuel subsidy.
Reacting, Zainab Ahmed said: “There is no imminent plan to remove subsidy. IMF said that fuel subsidy is better removed so that we can use the resources for other important sectors.
“In principle, It’s a good suggestion, but in Nigeria, we don’t have any plans to remove fuel subsidy at this time because we have not yet designed buffers that will enable us to remove the subsidy and provide cushions for our people.
“So there is no plan to remove fuel subsidy.
“We will be working with various groups to find an alternative if we have to remove it. We are not yet at the point of removing fuel subsidy yet,” she said.
Ahmed described the outing in Washington DC as a successful one, which provided Nigeria with the opportunity to review developments in the global economy and proffer potential solutions.
She said that the general advice for Nigeria is to prioritise cost-effective policies that would increase resilience to shocks, boost productivity and raise incomes of the bottom 40 per cent of the population.
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