Professor Jibrin Ibrahim, member, governing board of the Center for Democracy and Development (CDD), has said the planned palliative by the federal government could fail to serve its intended purpose just like that of COVID-19.

After the removal of subsidy, President Bola Tinubu had set up a committee to strategise on palliative to cushion the effect of the policy which led to pump price of fuel being jacked up times three.

Speaking on an ARISE TV programme, Prof Ibrahim said, “The palliative can easily become another fuel subsidy and we saw that very clearly during COVID-19, where the ministry of disaster management claimed they were paying billions of naira every month for school feeding.

“And we knew that schools were closed, children were at home, and when that question was posed, the response was they had traced the people and students, and the question then became ‘how?’

“We do know that for the fuel subsidy, there have been a significant attempt to identify and map the poor in this country. This has been going over the last decade; they do have a list of very poor families. There is a history of conditional grant supports to families.

“I believe that when the audit is done on some of the palliatives paid during COVID-19, it will be discovered that it’s one of the greatest robberies in the history of this country. So, that’s the problem with with subsidy palliative.”

Earlier in April, the federal government under former President Muhammadu Buhari had said it had secured the sum of $800 million from the World Bank, as part of its post-subsidy palliative plans.

It had promised to pay N5,000 to 10 million poor households for six months as palliative for removing petrol subsidy after June.