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Nigeria: Fuel subsidy removal met with protests
Protesters unhappy over spiraling gas prices set fires on an expressway Tuesday and at least one person was killed in the unrest after Nigeria’s government did away with a subsidy program that had kept fuel costs down for more than two decades.
One union leader described the federal government’s unpopular move as “immoral and politically suicidal,” and urged Nigerians to resist the measure.
Crowds vandalized gas stations, intimidated owners into keeping their pumps unused and assaulted a soldier.
One young man threw jerrycans of engine oil off the racks at a gas station and tried to damage the station’s gas pumps. After union leader and chairman of the Joint Action Front, Dipo Fashina, asked the young man to stop vandalizing the station, he did, but later started one of the first bonfires of the protest in the middle of the highway.
Other activists marched to the protest songs of the late Afrobeat pioneer Fela Anikulapo-Kuti who fought against the injustices of military rule in Nigeria. His musician son, Seun, walked shirtless among the demonstrators, as his father used to, and also made attempts to keep things civil.
In the central city of Ilorin, another demonstration where policemen fired tear gas left a man dead. The National Labor Congress accused the police in a statement Tuesday of shooting the “antifuel hike protester.”
However, Kwara state police spokesman Dabo Ezekiel denied the claim, saying the man was stabbed by motorcycle-taxi drivers angered because they believed he was against their cause. Mr. Ezekiel couldn’t say what triggered the attack.
The Nigerian government’s quiet announcement over the long holiday weekend that the popular subsidy was being ended triggered a wave of protests in Africa’s most populous nation of 160 million.
