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Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, the presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), has rattled the ruling party in a manner it did not expect. His proposal to re-introduce the subsidy regime has thrown the ruling party into turmoil. Nothing expresses this more than the rushed meeting with governors and the hurried decision to rework the fuel framework to ensure cheaper transportation. That is desperation. Desperation to find answers to a problem ignited by the May 29, 2023 pronouncement that “subsidy is gone.”
Many Nigerians, including me, agree that subsidy had to go because of the corruption in its administration. But they expected, as Tinubu argued in his 2015 widely publicised article titled “President Jonathan breaks social contract with the people”, that the same pre-conditions he recommended for President Jonathan to put in place before removing subsidy on petrol would have formed the plank of his subsidy removal order. But he was overtaken by a “burst of courage” to take a decision that, looking back, has had a devastating negative effect on the population, driving more people into multidimensional poverty than the indicators showed under the subsidy regime. Never mind that the IMF keeps deodorising us with statistics. After all, “na statistics we go chop?”
Atiku has had enough time to study that decision and its impact on governance and poverty reduction in Nigeria. And his proposal to reintroduce subsidy with a more measured plan at subsidising local refining, production and manufacturing is attracting more support from the streets, where the majority is, than whatever rhetoric the government has had to say so far. Every argument and framing they have made so far in defence has failed to convince the streets that the blanket removal of subsidy makes good governance or economic sense.
For most Nigerian families, it is base cruelty forcing them to pay twice for the same failure. First, poor Nigerians paid through decades of a subsidy regime that was riddled with round-tripping, phantom imports and unverifiable claims and enriched a small cartel while starving the treasury. Then, having endured that theft in silence, they are told that the only remedy was to strip them of all support and force them to absorb the full pain, while the very inefficiency that corrupted the subsidy regime in the first place goes largely unaddressed. This is the logic that Atiku has now refused to accept. His proposed rework of Nigeria’s subsidy architecture through redirecting government support from imported petrol to domestically refined production deserves serious attention, not as a hang-on of the old regime, but as a corrective to a policy that has punished ordinary Nigerians for sins they did not commit.
The Tinubu administration has framed subsidy removal as an ‘either-or’ situation. Either Nigeria pays subsidies it cannot afford, or frees itself entirely and allows the market to decide. Atiku’s position now rejects that framing. Atiku is clear that his proposal is not a return to the old import-subsidy regime that was dotted by unverifiable claims and middlemen, but an intervention that would account for the oil from Nigerian refineries rather than from foreign cargo manifests. It is an intervention that will also redirect support toward domestic production, which will reduce energy and transport costs as well as restore the purchasing power of the minimum wage.
This distinction matters a lot, and it is exactly what Tinubu and APC goons are struggling to keep away from the public. To subsidise importation is to subsidise Nigeria’s dependence on foreign refineries, foreign shipping and foreign exchange exposure. That enterprise practically guarantees leakage because the government is paying for oil that it can neither count nor verify with certainty. To subsidise domestic production, by contrast, is to subsidise Nigerian refineries, Nigerian jobs and a Nigerian currency base. This option is auditable because the oil never leaves the country. A subsidy that follows verifiable domestic output is not the same as a subsidy that follows unverifiable imported cargo.
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The broader argument for reworking rather than blanket removal of subsidy on fuel is a moral one. Here, Atiku’s position speaks directly to the lived experiences of unlucky Nigerians. Blanket subsidy removal did not punish architects of the corruption that made subsidy unsustainable. It chastised households that had spent years building their own infrastructure because government had failed to provide reliable public services. Millions of Nigerians power their homes and businesses with solar panels and petrol generators at high costs because the national grid is terribly inefficient. Entire communities have dug their own boreholes because public water schemes exist on paper. Residents in many local government areas grade and pave the very roads that government agencies were funded to maintain.
These are not the actions of a lazy or dependent citizenry waiting for rice and noodles palliatives. They are rather the actions of a resourceful people who have been forced into destitution and to become their own government in the most basic sectors of daily life, and at high cost to their pockets, because their government failed in its responsibility to uphold the social contract. To then ask this same population to absorb the full, unmitigated price of subsidy removal, with no meaningful production-side alternative and no evidence that the savings are reaching them, is to punish the victims of governance failure a second time. That’s double jeopardy. It asks citizens who already pay privately to generate electricity, water, pave roads and even provide security for themselves to now also pay the full market price for fuel, while the savings from subsidy removal fund the piggishness of a few.
This leaves us with a question. If the purpose of removing subsidy was to free up resources for public infrastructure and uplift the lives of Nigerians, those resources ought to, by now, be visible in expanded healthcare access, functioning public schools, reliable electricity and roads that do not require community self-help schemes to remain passable. But they are not. So, where are the savings going? Many Nigerians say the more visible dividends of the post-subsidy savings go into expanded convoys of armoured utility vehicles for state governors, ministers and other government appointees, and the multiplication of executive jets maintained at public expense. They also show up in the proliferation of state airports whose passenger traffic rarely justifies their cost and other projects, which simply flatter a governor far more than they improve the daily life of the people. So, how can a policy which imposes unmitigated pain on the population be excused for yielding savings whose distribution is opaque and unexplained to the very people paying for it?
Some have argued that subsidy, no matter its type, is prone to the same risk of abuse that discredited the old regime. This is a legitimate concern. However, concern about design is not the same as opposition to the principle. The principle at stake is straightforward. It is about government support that should build Nigeria’s productive capacity, not simply fatten a fiscal book while citizens continue to privately provide electricity, water, security and build roads that public revenue was supposed to provide. Besides, expressing the fear about corruption risk is a further indictment of government and a failure of open governance. Here, government tells Nigerians that it lacks the capacity to fight corruption even with its multiple anti-corruption agencies. The reason for this lies in the statement itself. Government is incapable of fighting corruption because government accepts corruption as a governance principle and the corrupt are mostly friends of the government in power. In essence, government is unable to fight corruption because it is a beneficiary of the corrupt system, as the middlemen who profit from subsidy corruption are expected to fund party activities and election campaigns. So, why punish the people who have no hand in the corruption that benefits the government in power?
A subsidy regime rebuilt around domestic refining, transparent verification and a clear exit mechanism offers something that blanket removal has not. It is a credible link between the sacrifice citizens are asked to make and the productive capacity that sacrifice is meant to build. Until that link is restored, and until governors are held to the same standard of accountability that impoverished Nigerians have imposed on themselves for years, it will remain difficult to ask a people who have learned to govern themselves in the small things to keep paying, without complaint, for a government that is the prime beneficiary of a corrupt subsidy regime.
In 2015, Nigerians agreed to endure the pain that comes with APC reforms. That pain cannot be perpetual. It’s been almost 12 years of unadulterated pain for Nigerian families. Meanwhile, hell is still waiting for those who will end up there. Government should show empathy and “let the poor breathe” a little.
