₦airaland Forum

Atiku Abubakar may finally have discovered the issue that can draw political blood from President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. And I am enjoying seeing the president and his inner circle squirm in discomfort like cats stranded on a hot zinc roof.

On Thursday, barely a day after official campaigns began for the 2027 presidential election, Atiku pledged to restore petrol subsidies if Nigerians elect him president. That pledge, more than anything he has done lately to dislodge Tinubu, is the clearest signal yet that he is prepared to wrest power from the president.

Before now, Atiku expended money, time and energy excavating Tinubu’s past, much of which Nigerians already know. Tinubu’s 1993 civil forfeiture of $460,000 to the US government in a case that grew out of a heroin-trafficking investigation has been public knowledge for years. It was Sahara Reporters that first reported it on September 15, 2008. Fresh FBI or DEA papers are unlikely to suddenly alter electoral attitudes.

The Chicago State University expedition was even less politically useful. Tinubu genuinely attended and graduated from CSU in 1979. Caleb Westberg, the university’s registrar, said so under oath. He agreed that the photocopy Tinubu submitted to INEC did not look like the 1979 samples shown to him, but CSU’s diploma templates changed over the years and the BBC found that Tinubu’s copy resembled replacement diplomas from the 1990s. Westberg also said the missing portion of the university logo could have been cut off during photocopying because American diplomas are unusually large and aren’t intended to be photocopied.

In America, diplomas are largely ceremonial documents that people frame and hang on walls. Transcripts are the official records routinely used to verify attendance and graduation. Atiku’s legal expedition ironically helped establish that Tinubu has a CSU transcript and graduated with honors.

The BBC Global Disinformation Team found no evidence for the claim that Tinubu forged the CSU diploma he submitted to INEC. The report, in fact, won “Fact-Check of the Year by a Working Journalist” at the 2024 African Fact-Checking Awards in Accra. In other words, Atiku spent enormous political energy helping to settle a question whose answer was electorally barren.

Tinubu understood this and mostly ignored the attacks. More importantly, Atiku offered little policy distance from Tinubu on the economic question that has tormented Nigerians since May 2023. He had promised during the last election to remove petrol subsidies within his first 100 days in office. On the most consequential economic policy of the Tinubu presidency, Atiku was traveling on the same ideological road.

That changed this week. Atiku asked the question millions of Nigerians have been asking: where is the money supposedly saved from subsidy removal? He then promised a new subsidy structure that would privilege locally refined petrol, give qualifying Nigerian refineries crude at preferential prices, impose a fixed annual spending ceiling, trace subsidized crude to actual domestic production and punish diversion. His formulation is that “the subsidy will follow the barrel.”

That is a more serious proposal than the Presidency’s caricature of it. And Tinubu suddenly found his voice. He personally dismissed Atiku’s pledge as a demonstration of “serious ignorance” of governance and the economy. Atiku’s previous assaults on Tinubu’s character produced studied presidential indifference. But his challenge to the economic orthodoxy that has pauperized Nigerians produced presidential irritation. That means he struck a raw nerve.

If Atiku’s proposal demonstrates ignorance, what does Tinubu’s policy demonstrate? Any honest person knows the answer: cruelty. Between ignorance and cruelty, which is more benign? You be the judge.

The anti-subsidy theology that Tinubu and his neoliberal choristers recite has always rested on a false premise. Subsidy simply means government assistance. Every functional society subsidizes something its people need for survival and economic productivity. Governments subsidize food, agriculture, housing, healthcare, transportation or energy according to the peculiarities of their societies.

For Nigeria, petrol occupies a uniquely central place because it doubles as an infrastructural substitute. People buy petrol because public electricity is unreliable. Small businesses generate their own power. Goods move mostly by road. Workers commute in vehicles powered by fuel. Farmers, artisans, traders and manufacturers absorb fuel costs and pass them on through prices.Executive Branch

A petrol subsidy therefore travels through the economy. Its removal travels through the economy too, only in the opposite direction. It raises transportation costs, production costs, food prices and the cost of nearly everything that depends on movement or power.

I warned about this exactly one month before Tinubu was inaugurated. In my April 29, 2023, column titled “Six Agenda Items for Tinubu’s Success,” I warned that any policy that caused an arbitrary and unbearable increase in petrol prices without a corresponding improvement in incomes and living conditions would sink Tinubu. That warning was elementary commonsense.

The subsidy removal has since wreaked havoc on the economy, deepened poverty, killed businesses, murdered hope, hollowed out the middle class and democratized misery. Reuters now describes the aftermath of Tinubu’s reforms as the worst cost-of-living crisis in a generation. Nearly 80 percent of Nigerians in a recent voter tracker said the country was headed in the wrong direction.

The government’s answer is always the same sterile, tired, intentionally dishonest incantation: temporary pains will yield permanent gains. But we have heard that sermon before.History

Ibrahim Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Program came with the same vocabulary of sacrifice, deregulation, currency devaluation, subsidy withdrawal and deferred prosperity. Nigerians were told to endure pain today for abundance tomorrow. By the time Babangida left in 1993, manufacturing had been battered, purchasing power had collapsed and social misery had spread. The promised gains vanished into the ether.

Only living people can enjoy future gains. A government that starves people in installments cannot redeem itself with a hypothetical prosperity scheduled for an undefined tomorrow.

Tinubu’s most frequently advertised dividend of subsidy removal is that states now receive more money and can pay salaries and pensions. That is useful to salary earners, pensioners and the relatives who depend on them. Every Nigerian with a functioning brain cell knows that formal salary and pension earners constitute only a small fraction of Nigeria’s population. The wellbeing of state treasuries is a poor substitute for the wellbeing of the vast majority of citizens.Executive Branch

What kind of economic triumph makes governors more solvent while making citizens poorer? Government has improved the liquidity of public treasuries by draining the liquidity of household economies.

Atiku has finally opened a policy flank that Tinubu cannot wave away with moral insults, ethnic mobilization or tales of macroeconomic “reform.”

Nonetheless, Atiku’s conversion deserves scrutiny. He promised in 2023 to remove the same subsidy he now wants to restore in a redesigned form. I disagreed with him then. A politician who changes his mind after observing the destructive consequences of a policy can reasonably plead that evidence changed his assumptions. Nigerians also have abundant reasons to distrust politicians who discover compassion during campaigns.

They campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Tinubu, after all, told Nigerians during the 2023 campaign that if he failed to give them electricity and returned for a second term, they should not vote for him, although he inserted an escape clause about giving “adequate reasons” for failure. Muhammadu Buhari promised a paradise of security, prosperity and integrity before power exposed the hollowness of his promises.

Atiku therefore has work to do. He must keep explaining the cost of his subsidy plan, its funding source, its legal path under the Petroleum Industry Act, its anti-corruption safeguards and the mechanisms that will ensure cheaper energy reaches households and industries. He should put these commitments in language that can be measured and used against him if he wins.History

In spite of my well-justified distrust of the promises of politicians, including Atiku who supervised a ruinous privation program when he was vice president, I can’t help but concede that this is the first truly useful political argument of the 2027 campaign.

Policy contrast is finally replacing pointless and unproductive character assassination. Nigerians already know that Tinubu has a morally complicated past, but they live every day with something more immediate: the extortionate price of food, transport, electricity, medicine and survival.

Atiku has finally moved the contest from Tinubu’s old files in America to Nigerian kitchens, markets, factories and motor parks. That is where Tinubu is most vulnerable. Tinubu can survive old scandals, but the mass hunger his “reforms” have created is a more formidable opponent than impotent darts thrown at his character.

FSBoperator:
Anyone thinking Atiku or any other politician can lie brazenly on returning fuel subsidy to garner votes is delusional.

If Atiku is even honest (for once) that he will return subsidy, has he even considered that no sitting state governor will be in support of such ?

Their allocations will only plummet and those ones who have taken on projects based on their expected monthly allocations will not be able to complete it.

There are also loan obligations by states based on this current allocation made only possible by fuel subsidy removal.

States will not only be able to complete existing projects but also their loan obligations.

What of the new wage bills ?

How will both the state and federal govts meet their new obligations to staff while still paying subsidy ?

There's no way in hell freezing over that subsidy can be restarted without heading the country straight to bankruptcy.

HIGHESTPOPORI:
If Ordinary Nigerians prefer subsidy to return and fuel price go down,so be it.Its not sitting Govs that would decide because they want the subsidy money ,it's the people bearing the pains of high fuel price that would decide

Tenses:
Atiku proposing for total subsidy removal is a masterstroke.

For the first time in several years I am considering voting for Atiku.

I will propose to PO to suspend subsidy removal for atleast one year and reintroduce it gradually in such a way Nigerians won't feel the brunt of it.

That snitch in aso rock can go fxxxk himself.

FSBoperator:
You won't be saying this trash if states had full resource control.

This is why I keep writing about how SE is the biggest enemy to resource control for oil producing states and have documented several instances were SE have sided with the birth to deny Oil producing states full resource control .


Let's do it like this, let every state control their resources within their domain and keep 50% of it for themselves and remit 50 to the centre .

When that happens, I will see how you will demand for free oil money and subsidy payment.

AMINDA:
"You do not build a federation by impoverishing citizens so that Abuja can send bigger cheques to governors. That is robbing households to subsidise governments."

- Alhaji Atiku Abubakar

FSBoperator:
Anyone thinking Atiku or any other politician can lie brazenly on returning fuel subsidy to garner votes is delusional.

If Atiku is even honest (for once) that he will return subsidy, has he even considered that no sitting state governor will be in support of such ?

Their allocations will only plummet and those ones who have taken on projects based on their expected monthly allocations will not be able to complete it.

There are also loan obligations by states based on this current allocation made only possible by fuel subsidy removal.

States will not only be able to complete existing projects but also their loan obligations.

What of the new wage bills ?

How will both the state and federal govts meet their new obligations to staff while still paying subsidy ?

There's no way in hell freezing over that subsidy can be restarted without heading the country straight to bankruptcy.

FSBoperator:
And you do not build a true federal system by robbing Paul to give to Peter

That is communism and not true federalism.

AMINDA:
Over 30 countries globally currently subsidise fuel in one form or the other. They aren't practising Communism. Even the US subsidizes its agricultural sector and many more areas.

Tinubu’s courtiers may clap because FAAC allocations have increased, but hungry Nigerians cannot boil FAAC figures for dinner. Businesses cannot power factories with presidential speeches, workers cannot pay transport fares with macroeconomic grammar, and parents cannot settle school fees with statistics manufactured for State House applause”

- Alhaji Atiku Abubakar

Predictor3:
you still don't get it. The Nigerian masses don't understand this points you are highlighting. They're concerned about the present and the rumble of hunger in their stomaches

chiiraq802:
There's nothing Atiku can do to rattle power off tinubu...that time has long passed, he knows deepdwon he is just wasting him nd his followers time.

He is fulfilling nature just like late Raila Odinga of Kenya, Bobby wine of Uganda, Julius Mamela of SA

Tenses:
Atiku proposing for total subsidy removal is a masterstroke.

For the first time in several years I am considering voting for Atiku.

I will propose to PO to suspend subsidy removal for atleast one year and reintroduce it gradually in such a way Nigerians won't feel the brunt of it.

That snitch in aso rock can go fxxxk himself.

FSBoperator:
And we can't afford it.

Plain and simple.

We practiced it for over 40ys starting with Murtala and where did it get us ?

You can also argue that Trump is also subsidizing US crude prices by draining the US strategic crude reserves but that is now over because the reserves have plummeted and can not hide the fact of 30% global crude supply taken out from circulation due to the closure of the straits of Hormuz.

The fact remains that instead of subsidizing our major revenue earner for domestic consumption, subvention should go to infrastructure and agriculture.

Stop wasting money you don't have on a limited resource .

EV technology is getting cheaper .

Partnering with China to build EV battery plants in Nigeria can go a long way in solving the transportation issue.

Channel resources to sustainable and job creating ventures instead of a corrupt subsidy regime.

FSBoperator:
And we can't afford it.

Plain and simple.

We practiced it for over 40ys starting with Murtala and where did it get us ?

You can also argue that Trump is also subsidizing US crude prices by draining the US strategic crude reserves but that is now over because the reserves have plummeted and can not hide the fact of 30% global crude supply taken out from circulation due to the closure of the straits of Hormuz.

The fact remains that instead of subsidizing our major revenue earner for domestic consumption, subvention should go to infrastructure and agriculture.

Stop wasting money you don't have on a limited resource .

EV technology is getting cheaper .

Partnering with China to build EV battery plants in Nigeria can go a long way in solving the transportation issue.

Channel resources to sustainable and job creating ventures instead of a corrupt subsidy regime.

AMINDA:
Succinctly put!

"If Atiku’s proposal demonstrates ignorance, what does Tinubu’s policy demonstrate? Any honest person knows the answer: cruelty. Between ignorance and cruelty, which is more benign? You be the judge"

- Prof. Farooq Kperogi.

FSBoperator:
You have no constitutional right to subsidized fuel .

Why should Fuel be subsidized but the agricultural products from northern farmers which are heavily subsidized by the FG are not ?

What makes crude oil in the Niger Delta everyone's common wealth but the gold in zamfara not ?

Atiku should first nationalize all of Zamfara gold that is being mined by terrorists and their enablers use the revenue from it to pay for fuel subsidy.

AMINDA:
"You do not build a federation by impoverishing citizens so that Abuja can send bigger cheques to governors. That is robbing households to subsidise governments."

- Alhaji Atiku Abubakar

chiiraq802:
There's nothing Atiku can do to rattle power off tinubu...that time has long passed, he knows deepdwon he is just wasting him nd his followers time.

He is fulfilling nature just like late Raila Odinga of Kenya, Bobby wine of Uganda, Julius Mamela of SA

FSBoperator:
Anyone thinking Atiku or any other politician can lie brazenly on returning fuel subsidy to garner votes is delusional.

If Atiku is even honest (for once) that he will return subsidy, has he even considered that no sitting state governor will be in support of such ?

Their allocations will only plummet and those ones who have taken on projects based on their expected monthly allocations will not be able to complete it.

There are also loan obligations by states based on this current allocation made only possible by fuel subsidy removal.

States will not only be able to complete existing projects but also their loan obligations.

What of the new wage bills ?

How will both the state and federal govts meet their new obligations to staff while still paying subsidy ?

There's no way in hell freezing over that subsidy can be restarted without heading the country straight to bankruptcy.

FSBoperator:
You won't be saying this trash if states had full resource control.

This is why I keep writing about how SE is the biggest enemy to resource control for oil producing states and have documented several instances were SE have sided with the birth to deny Oil producing states full resource control .


Let's do it like this, let every state control their resources within their domain and keep 50% of it for themselves and remit 50 to the centre .

When that happens, I will see how you will demand for free oil money and subsidy payment.

AMINDA:
You are currently affording it. Just at a much higher cost than before. Both in financial terms and in hardship faced by the people.

AMINDA:
Atiku is not currently president. Vote Atiku/Amaechi come 2027 and consider it done! By the way, Tinubu just appointed Abdulaziz Yari of Zamfara as DG of his campaign council. The jokes write themselves.

FSBoperator:
You have no constitutional right to subsidized fuel .

Why should Fuel be subsidized but the agricultural products from northern farmers which are heavily subsidized by the FG are not ?

What makes crude oil in the Niger Delta everyone's common wealth but the gold in zamfara not ?

Atiku should first nationalize all of Zamfara gold that is being mined by terrorists and their enablers use the revenue from it to pay for fuel subsidy.

Gotocourt:
Same Yari he rejected as SP 😂🤣😅.