THE United Action for Democracy (UAD) has expressed concern over the recent visit of the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Ms Christine Lagarde, to Nigeria.

In a statement, the UAD National Convener, Baba Aye described the IMF as an “anti-poor international financial institution, from which nothing good can be expected by working class-people”.

According to Aye, “it is very telling that Lagarde applauded President Buhari’s economic policy thrust. It confirms our fears that the APC government is representative of the rich bosses, as IMF would never throw its weight behind a developmental agenda that benefits and is driven by the working masses.”

He said the removal of fuel subsidy with the mask of “price modulation” is itself based on IMF policy advise, calling for deregulation.

Without fixing the problem of domestic refining, UAD argued, fuel pump price is likely to rise despite falling global prices of oil, as a result of freight and related costs of fuel importation.
According to Aye, removing fuel subsidy instead of ‘pulling down the house of corruption that has smeared it amounts to throwing away the baby with the bath water’.

He blamed the development on the “newfound love” between President Buhari and the IMF “whose influence on the Nigerian economy he resisted as a military dictator in the early 1980s”.

UAD called on Nigerians not to be deceived by “fine sounding words of the IMF boss”, adding that her promise that the Bretton Woods institution would help with restructuring our country’s tax system is “laden with dangers”.

Reacting to a scheduled meeting of Lagarde with some Civil Society Organisations (CSO), UAD said those CSOs “are definitely not representative platforms of social movements, but merely proposal-driven NGOs which help to perpetuate western imperialism’s hold on the jugular of the Nigerian economy”.