Presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC) for the 2027 election, Atiku Abubakar, has said that the sufferings encountered by Nigerians, in the aftermath of the end of the fuel subsidy regime by President Bola Tinubu is not a sign that the policy succeeded.

Atiku, in a statement by his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, dismissed the president’s criticism of Atiku’s promise to return fuel subsidy, under a new model, ‘as the insolent sermon of a failed economic experimenter who mistakes Nigerians’ capacity to endure suffering for evidence that his policies are working.”

The president, on assumption of office on May 29, 2023, had announced the end of the fuel subsidy regime.

However, the former vice president, while faulting the manner the present administration approached the policy, promised to return the fuel subsidy, under a new model, if elected.

Atiku, while defending his proposed fuel subsidy model, likened the President’s reforms to “economic arson followed by propaganda.”

He stated: “Here is an administration that detonated simultaneous fuel price, exchange rate and cost of living shocks across a fragile economy, watched millions become poorer, and now struts around Abuja demanding applause for the wreckage.

“That is not reform. It is economic arson followed by propaganda about the ashes.

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.

“A government that grows richer while its citizens grow poorer is not reforming an economy. It is extracting from its people.

Tinubu should therefore spare Nigerians the economics lecture. A man who set the house on fire cannot ridicule another man for redesigning the fire extinguisher.”

The ADC candidate accused President Tinubu of casually declaring that “subsidy is gone” without a credible transition plan or adequate cushions against the inflationary effects.

According to him, “those three words were not economic policy. They were economic vandalism by presidential fiat. Petrol prices exploded. Transportation and production costs followed. The naira depreciated sharply. Food prices soared. Businesses buckled and household purchasing power was decimated.

“Having destroyed the economic assumptions upon which previous prescriptions rested, Tinubu’s propagandists now accuse Atiku of inconsistency for responding to the disaster they created.

“Atiku is not proposing the resurrection of the corrupt, open-ended subsidy bazaar. He proposes a targeted, capped, budgeted, time-bound and independently audited production-support mechanism tied to domestic production and protected against arbitrage.

“The difference is simple: Tinubu pronounced first and searched for a plan afterwards. Atiku studied the consequences and produced a solution. But there is an even greater hypocrisy in Tinubu’s subsidy sermon, he stated.

Atiku added: “Tinubu told Nigerians subsidy was dead. Yet NNPC’s audited accounts reportedly contain approximately ₦17.5 trillion in energy-security costs and petroleum under-recoveries, including about ₦7.13 trillion classified as Energy Security and ₦8.67 trillion in under-recoveries.” (The Sun)