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By James Adeleye
There is something profoundly unsettling about politics in Nigeria: the uncanny ability of politicians to suddenly rediscover yesterday’s solutions precisely when tomorrow’s election is approaching.
As the 2027 general elections draw nearer, fuel subsidy has made a dramatic return to Nigeria’s political discourse. Atiku Abubakar, former vice president and presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), has suddenly thrown his weight behind the restoration of fuel subsidy, a proposition calculated, understandably, to resonate with millions of Nigerians groaning under soaring transportation costs, food prices and cost-of-living crisis. It is an attractive proposition. And therein lies the danger. Nothing is more politically seductive than telling a suffering population that the price of petrol can simply be brought down. But governance is not a supermarket where politicians pick the most popular item from the shelf during election season. There is a bill attached. And Nigerians must insist on seeing that bill.
In 2023, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Atiku Abubakar of the then Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) all supported the removal of fuel subsidy. Peter Obi had described the subsidy regime as an “organised crime” and promised to remove it. Atiku also campaigned on subsidy reform. And President Tinubu, following his victory and at his inauguration on May 29, 2023, famously declared: “Subsidy is gone.” Nigeria has never been the same since then.
The declaration was followed by an explosion in petrol pump prices and a chain reaction across the economy. Transport became more expensive. Food became more expensive. Businesses faced higher logistics and production costs. Families saw their disposable income evaporate. Nobody should trivialise that pain. But neither should anybody exploit it to rewrite history.
Suddenly, yesterday’s problem has become tomorrow’s solution. The subsidy that was previously acknowledged as unsustainable is now being presented as an instrument of economic salvation. And the enormous resources Nigeria was pouring into subsidising petrol have conveniently disappeared from the conversation.
The World Bank estimated that petrol subsidy amounted to about 2.2 percent of GDP in 2022 and consumed more government revenue than the combined federal spending on health, education and social protection. Worse, the benefits were disproportionately captured by richer Nigerians because those who consumed more petrol naturally received more of the subsidy. This was not a benevolent economic miracle. It was an expensive distortion.
It encouraged smuggling across Nigeria’s borders, weakened public finances, created opportunities for fraud and opacity, and diverted resources that could have been used to build infrastructure and strengthen public services. Most painfully, it created the illusion that petrol was cheap while the country itself was becoming poorer. That is the part of the story election-year politics wants Nigerians to forget.
Let nobody misunderstand the argument. The removal of petroleum subsidy has been painful. Very painful. For the trader who now spends substantially more transporting goods to the market, subsidy removal is not an academic concept. For the civil servant whose salary has not kept pace with inflation, it is not a theoretical reform. For the farmer paying more to move produce from the farm to the city, it is not a World Bank statistic. For the student whose parents can barely afford transportation, it is life.
That is precisely why the government must not become complacent. Those who have sacrificed through this reform deserve to see its dividends. If subsidy removal has freed enormous public resources, Nigerians have every right to ask where the money is going. They have every right to demand visible infrastructure, better transportation, improved electricity, stronger healthcare, better education, security and targeted support for vulnerable citizens.
Government cannot say, “We removed the subsidy, therefore suffer.” President Tinubu, at every turn, has rather acknowledged that he feels the pain of the masses and that things will be better subsequently. The inconvenient truth is that though subsidy removal hurts, it does not automatically mean subsidy removal is a wrong economic policy. Sometimes the medicine hurts because the disease has been neglected for decades. Nigeria spent years postponing the inevitable. Successive governments talked about subsidy reform. Committees were established. Reports were written. Promises were made. But politics repeatedly defeated economics.
Then somebody finally pulled the plug. The result was bound to be traumatic. But the alternative was not some economic Garden of Eden. Rather, it was continuing to spend scarce public resources subsidising petrol while schools, hospitals, roads, electricity and other public infrastructure cried for funding. Nigeria cannot indefinitely consume tomorrow’s development to subsidise today’s petrol. That is the central truth politicians must not bury beneath campaign rhetoric. And this is where Atiku’s proposition becomes particularly interesting.
Why now? Why is subsidy suddenly being resurrected as an electoral instrument as the 2027 contest approaches? The answer is obvious enough. Nigerians are hurting. Tell a man whose transport fare has doubled that you will reduce petrol prices and you immediately have his attention. Tell a woman struggling to feed her family that fuel will become cheaper and she will listen. This is politics 101. But presidential politics should be more sophisticated than emotional arithmetic.
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The question is not whether Nigerians want cheaper petrol. Of course they do. The question is: Who will pay for it? That is the question every Nigerian voter should ask when politicians promise subsidy restoration. Will the government pay? From what revenue? Will it be borrowed? Will it reduce spending elsewhere? Will taxes Increase? Will the government accumulate arrears? Will Nigeria return to the same opaque system that made subsidy a breeding ground for controversy? Or will a new subsidy simply be invented under another name in the hope that Nigerians will not notice? Truth is there is no free subsidy. Somebody pays. Ultimately, the Nigerian taxpayer pays.
Atiku’s new position therefore looks less like a coherent economic prescription and more like political nostalgia packaged as economic salvation. It appeals to today’s pain without adequately confronting tomorrow’s bill. Nigeria’s problem has never been a shortage of policies that produce immediate relief. Our problem has been policies that are sustainable. For decades, Nigeria chose consumption over investment. We earned oil revenue and consumed it. We borrowed and consumed. We subsidised and consumed. We imported what we could produce. We spent billions keeping petrol artificially cheap while failing to build an economy capable of producing enough petroleum products efficiently for itself. That cycle had to end.
The emergence of significant domestic refining capacity offers Nigeria an opportunity to change that story. Instead of perpetually subsidising imported petroleum products, Nigeria should be moving towards an economy where crude oil is processed domestically, jobs are created locally, supply chains are developed and petroleum pricing becomes increasingly driven by productive capacity and competition. That is the direction of travel.
To turn around now simply because an election is approaching would be economic cowardice. Fine-tune the reform, yes. Reverse it, no! That distinction should be engraved in the national consciousness. If subsidy removal has produced unintended consequences, fix them. If poor Nigerians are suffering, cushion the impact. If transportation costs are excessive, support transportation directly rather than subsidising petrol for everybody, including those who can afford to pay. If food prices are high, attack production and logistics bottlenecks. If domestic refining needs support, provide the right policy environment. There are intelligent alternatives. What Nigeria does not need is a return to the old fiscal trap.
Nigerians must beware of election-year amnesia. The 2027 election will produce many promises. Some will be magnificent. Some will be impossible. Some will be emotionally irresistible. And some will be designed principally to exploit legitimate public anger. The electorate must therefore become more sophisticated than the politicians.
Atiku should answer some fundamental questions. How much will restoring subsidy cost? Where will the money come from? How long will it last? What happens when oil prices fall? What happens when government revenue declines? Who actually benefits? What happens five years after implementation? Those questions matter more than campaign applause because Nigeria has been here before.
Atiku Abubakar is entitled to his economic argument. He is entitled to challenge the Tinubu administration. He is entitled to tell Nigerians that he has a better way. That is democracy. But Nigerians are equally entitled to interrogate the proposition. The interrogation must go beyond the seductive declaration: “I will restore subsidy.” What kind of subsidy? How much? For how long? Who pays? Who benefits? And what happens when the money runs out?
The Nigerian people should not be deceived by political sophistry dressed up as economic salvation. The subsidy regime that existed before May 29, 2023 was not a golden age. It was a system that had become fiscally dangerous, economically distorted and increasingly difficult to sustain. Its removal has imposed pain. But pain is not proof of failure.
As 2027 approaches, Nigerians must therefore resist the temptation to vote with their immediate pain alone. They must vote with memory, reason and the future in mind.
Let politicians make their promises. Let them tell Nigerians what they intend to do. But let Nigerians ask the question that campaign slogans hate: “After the applause, who pays the bill?” Nigeria has already taken a painful step. The answer is not to turn around and start walking backwards. The answer is to keep moving, correct the mistakes, distribute the gains fairly and make the reform work. 2027 must not become the year Nigerians traded the difficult road to economic reform for the comfortable illusion of yesterday.
What Atiku is proposing is nothing but the sophistry of fuel subsidy — an attractive political proposition that seeks to convert legitimate economic pain into electoral advantage without adequately confronting the long-term cost.
And we all know that sophistry is not history. Nigeria does not need political gimmicks masquerading as economic solutions. It needs courage, consistency and policies that can survive beyond the applause of an election season. And that is the road we must travel.
• Adeleye, an Economist and Good Governance Advocate, writes from Victoria Island, Lagos.
