By Meikudi Ashiat
“The continuous rise in the prices of food items is making it difficult for us to feed properly. My children’s school fees are now something unbearable for me, they have resorted to sit back at home to engage in vocational work because of the hike on their tuition fees,” Abdulwahab Salau, a father of fifteen, lamented.
The resident of Ilorin, Kwara State has now been living hand to mouth, ever since the removal of the fuel subsidy. He has bemoaned how price in food items, commodites and school fees skyrocketed, making his children to scamper for vocational education.
Mr. Salau is one among the many Nigerians affected by the removal of fuel subsidy. The Nigerian government has, for decades, subsidised fuel and fixed retail prices of petroleum products.
This payment has however crippled the country’s s fiscal position and impacted the government’s ability to fund developmental projects across the nation.
In November 2021, the federal government announced its plan to remove the fuel subsidy and replace it with a monthly N5,000 transport grant for poor Nigerians.
But the government later suspended the plan after the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and Trade Union Congress (TUC) threatened to embark on mass protests.
Meanwhile, on 29th May, president Bola Ahmed Tinubu finally declared the removal of the policy, saying that there would no longer be a petroleum subsidy regime as the current 2023 budget he glimpsed does not contain it.
President Tinubu said the funds for subsidies will be diverted to other things like public infrastructure, education, health care and jobs.
To ameliorate the hardship occasioned by the policy, the government introduced a palliative system for the masses.
However, the food palliative, according to a public affair analyst, Hussein Adeleke, does not ring any impact on the poor it meant to serve.
“Food palliative, not the solution to the Suffering in the land as a result of subsidy removal. The palliative had rescinded, reinforced all kinds of the desperation of people to an extent that the palliative was hijacked and looted, some even go to the extent of selling the palliative, selling what is meant to sustain people’s hunger’s plight,” 
he said.
“And even if the government truly wanted to reduce suffering of the vulnerables, palliative can be on any other things like subsidizing education, providing mass transport skills to be conveying people to their destination with lesser charges.”
Just like Salau, Adama Muhammed, a pretty trader, has also gotten her fair share of the policy.
With seven children, Adama is now faced to embrace the life of a wretched widow with no achievement. She has been experiencing slow down demands in her business due to the daily increment in price of commodities.
The middle-aged woman has resorted to having an interval in her day of opening the store due to the high cost transport fare and regress low demand of goods.
“Ever since the subsidy and government policies to ameliorate the hardship, it yield no positive results although it’s said that when pap is pour into groundnut shell, those that will be satisfied will be and those that will not be satisfied will not, while this navigated bad effect on us, it has exceed our ability to bear, people are suffering” she lamented.
Poverty Has Now Become Endemic
Speaking with the traditional leader of Ibagun ward in Ilorin, Mallam Zakariyau Iyanda Abdulmalik said the rate at which poverty prevailed has swerved in the community is very alarming.
“Hunger has aggravated to an unbearable level despite, devoid of the government food items distribution,”