PERSPECTIVES: Fuel Subsidy or Hunger Subsidy: A Rivalry in Unweaving Truth
By Dibang Mary Akike
The removal of fuel subsidies is often presented as an act of courage an economic reform necessary to heal bloated budgets and attract global confidence. On paper, the logic appears clean: subsidies distort markets, reward inefficiency, and drain public funds that could be invested elsewhere. But beyond policy briefs and international applause lies another ledger one written in rising food prices, shrinking wages, and the quiet arithmetic of hunger.
Across much of Africa, fuel is not merely energy. It is transport, food distribution, electricity, healthcare access, and survival. When fuel prices rise abruptly, the shock does not stay at the pump. It travels, swiftly and cruelly, into markets, schools, hospitals, and kitchens. The cost of movement becomes the cost of living. What governments call subsidy removal, citizens experience as a hunger subsidy, an indirect policy that makes poverty more expensive. This is where the rivalry begins: between economic theory and human consequence, between what is said and what is felt.
International institutions have long urged subsidy reforms across the Global South, arguing that cheap fuel disproportionately benefits the wealthy and encourages waste. In theory, this is true. In practice, African economies rarely operate in the controlled environments assumed by these models. Public transport is underdeveloped. Social safety nets are weak or absent. Informal economies carry the weight of employment. When subsidies vanish without protection, the poor absorb the shock first and longest.
Governments promise that savings from subsidy removal will be redirected into infrastructure, healthcare, or targeted welfare. Yet trust is fragile in societies where public funds have historically leaked through corruption, mismanagement, or political patronage. For citizens already burdened by inflation and unemployment, the promise of future benefit rings hollow against the immediacy of empty plates.
This tension is not uniquely African. From France’s Yellow Vest protests to fuel riots in Latin America and Asia, subsidy politics have ignited global unrest. What differs is capacity. Wealthier states cushion reform with compensation, phased transitions, and reliable public services. Many African states attempt reform in crisis conditions high debt, currency instability, and pressure from external creditors leaving little room for gradual adjustment.
Thus, the debate becomes morally charged. Is subsidy removal an act of fiscal responsibility, or a transfer of pain from the state to its most vulnerable citizens? Is it reform, or austerity disguised as progress?
The language of policy often hides these questions. Terms like “market correction” and “fiscal discipline” sanitize suffering. Hunger, after all, does not appear on balance sheets. It appears in malnutrition statistics, school dropouts, informal borrowing, and the normalization of despair. When citizens protest, they are labeled resistant to change, irrational, or politically manipulated rather than hungry.
What is being unwoven here is not just economic policy, but truth itself. Truth about whose lives matter in reform timelines. Truth about who bears the cost of global economic prescriptions. Truth about governance failures that make subsidy dependence necessary in the first place.
A more honest conversation would move beyond the binary of fuel subsidy versus no subsidy. It would ask harder questions: Why must citizens pay for inefficiencies they did not create? Why are reforms implemented before protections? Why is the language of sacrifice so often directed downward?
For Africa and for the world, the challenge is not choosing between fuel and hunger, but refusing a system that treats them as acceptable trade-offs. True reform should reduce poverty, not repackage it. Anything less is not economic bravery. It is policy convenience, paid for in human lives.
Dibang Mary Akike is a Journalist with training in investigative journalism from the Al Jazeera Media Institute.Covers investigation Counters terrorism and conflict zone.
