Analysis | August 2026
There is a particular cruelty embedded in Nigerian electoral politics, which announces itself most loudly in an election year.
It is the cruelty of the familiar — the recycling of the same actors, pushing the same arguments. Same people who built the fire are offering to put it out.
The fuel subsidy debate tearing through the early campaigns ahead of the 2027 presidential election is not a policy debate. It is a rehearsed performance. And the audience — 220 million Nigerians who navigate one of the most punishing cost-of-living crises in the country’s history — are being asked to applaud.
Start with the man making the most noise.
THE VOW ATIKU FORGOT
In 2022, Atiku Abubakar, then Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP) presidential candidate, described petrol subsidy as a “fraud” and vowed to scrap it, boasting at the Lagos Business School Alumni Day that he had personally chaired the committee that removed fuel subsidy in phases during his time as Nigeria’s Vice President.
By December 2022, he had sharpened that position further, promising to remove the petrol subsidy within his first 100 days in office if elected.
He lost the 2023 election. Tinubu won. And on May 29, 2023, at Eagle Square, Tinubu declared that fuel subsidy was gone.
Now, in 2026, with the 2027 campaign formally underway, Atiku has returned — with a new position.
He says he will restore the petrol subsidy if elected, arguing that the removal of the subsidy has not resulted in improved living conditions for Nigerians and questioning where the savings from the policy have gone.
The question the Nigerian public deserves answered is not whether Atiku is right about the suffering. He is. The question is: what changed in the man — and what stayed the same?
During the 2019 campaign he argued subsidy should go. In 2023, he again advocated removal, even while criticising the manner in which the Tinubu administration implemented the policy. So what changed? Did his economic philosophy change? Did the mathematics of subsidy suddenly become different? Or is this simply another campaign promise designed to appeal to Nigerians struggling with the cost of living?
His team’s answer to the hypocrisy charge is instructive. His spokesperson acknowledged that Atiku supported the removal of petrol subsidy during the 2023 campaign but argued that changing a policy position after observing its consequences should not automatically be regarded as hypocrisy, and that the more important question is whether the policy has improved the lives of ordinary Nigerians.
That is a reasonable argument in isolation.
The problem is that Atiku was at the centre of political power — as Vice President for eight years, and as a perennial presidential candidate — long enough to know how the subsidy machine worked.
He helped to design it. He chaired the committee to dismantle it. He called it a fraud. And now he wants to bring it back. The policy question is legitimate. The messenger is compromised.
Tinubu’s Crushing Reforms
To be fair to the argument Atiku is making, the numbers behind the subsidy removal are brutal — and they are real.
Nigeria’s headline inflation rose from 28.9% in December 2023 to 29.9% in January 2024, and continued its upward trajectory, reaching 34.19% by June 2024 — the highest level recorded in nearly two decades — driven primarily by rising fuel and food prices and currency depreciation.
World Bank projections estimated that by the end of 2024, about four in ten Nigerians would be living below the international poverty line.
The World Bank had earlier disclosed that four million Nigerians were pushed into poverty in the first six months of 2023 alone, with a further 7.1 million at risk if properly targeted measures were not implemented.
The Tinubu government’s response pointed to fiscal gains. The Finance Ministry claims the reforms generated N15.8 trillion in resources for the federation between June 2023 and December 2025. That figure is real. So is the hardship.
The question that remains unanswered — the one Atiku is now weaponising — is what happened to that money in the lives of the people who lost the subsidy.
Tinubu’s Finance Ministry has also acknowledged, in its reform scorecard, that household welfare and poverty remain unfinished areas of the reform programme. That is a bureaucratic way of saying: the savings landed somewhere, but not at the bottom.
And that is the heart of the matter. The political elite on both sides of this debate — in government and in opposition — have historically been the primary beneficiaries of how Nigeria’s petroleum economy is managed, whether subsidy exists or not.
Atiku’s Pivot and the Subsidy reframe.
Sensing the political exposure in his reversal, Atiku has tried to dress the promise in technocratic clothing.
He has unveiled the Atiku Economic Recovery Plan (AERP) 2027. According to him, he would not return to the import-based subsidy regime. Instead, he would introduce a production subsidy for qualifying Nigerian refineries. Refineries would obtain domestic crude at a preferential price, subject to production, efficiency, transparency, and domestic-supply conditions.
“My proposal is not to resurrect the old subsidy regime,” he has said. “We will move subsidy from importation to production, from middlemen to Nigerian refineries, and from unverifiable claims to verifiable barrels.”
This is a more intellectually serious proposal than a flat promise to “bring back subsidy.” But it raises its own questions. Nigeria’s domestic refining capacity, anchored by the troubled Dangote Refinery and decades of neglected public refineries, is still fragile.
Without a robust enforcement architecture, a production subsidy could invite manipulation. This mirrors the manipulation seen in the import subsidy regime, which became a symbol of state looting.
Former Kaduna Senator Shehu Sani stated the contradiction clearly – He has long subscribed to neoliberal prescriptions, including devaluation, privatisation, and subsidy removal.
For Atiku to reverse course merely to win votes raises serious questions Nigerians should not accept at face value.
The Third Voice:
Sowore and the Structural Critique
Omoyele Sowore of the African Action Congress offers a different diagnosis, though his electoral viability remains limited. His critique cuts through the Tinubu-Atiku exchange.
He argues both men are products of the same political system.
Atiku served as Vice President for eight years. During that era, enormous sums were poured into the power sector, yet millions of Nigerians remained in darkness. After decades at the centre of Nigeria’s political system, the question is what fundamentally different future is Atiku offering.
Sowore’s answer: nothing.
What Nigeria needs, he argues, is a clean break from the system that produced poverty, corruption, insecurity and darkness — not a recycling of its primary architects.
That argument resonates. It does not, however, come with a credible path to power, which is its own kind of political futility.
The People and the extortionate price of survival.
Strip away the press statements and the political theatre. What remains is this: majority of Nigerians are suffering from crushing mobility restrictions due to higher fuel costs. Hikes in transport fares, food prices, and services, plus closures of local industries, job losses, and poverty now define daily life.
Nigerians live every day not with politicians’ old files, but with something far more immediate: the extortionate price of food, transport, electricity, medicine and survival.
That is where this election will be decided. Not in Eagle Square. Not on X. In the markets, the motor parks, the kitchens, the classrooms that cannot afford the fuel to run a generator.
Trapped between the Architect and the Opportunist
What the 2027 presidential race has produced, at least in this opening act, is a contest between a government that imposed genuine pain in the name of reform and has struggled to account for the gains — and an opposition candidate who helped build the system he is now campaigning against, reversing his own stated positions with the election calendar as his only visible compass.
Nigerian voters are stuck between clueless actors whose plans are to perpetually alternate at the leadership wheel and steer toward the same ditch.
The subsidy argument Atiku is now making may be tactically correct — the money is missing, the pain is real, and someone must be held accountable.
But the man making it called the same instrument a fraud just three years ago and championed its dismantling for decades before that.
The Tinubu administration, for its part, cannot explain where N15.8 trillion in fiscal savings translated into measurable relief for the 40 percent of Nigerians now below the poverty line.
Both positions contain truth. Both men have credibility problems. Neither candidate offers a governing vision that centers the Nigerian poor as anything other than a constituency we will activate in January and abandon in February.
That is the real story of the 2027 race.
Not who is right about subsidy. But why, after sixty-five years of independence, the most consequential policy debate in the country is still about whether the poor deserve cheap fuel — and not about why the poor remain poor regardless of which of these men wins.
Mr Tobiloba Johnson, resides in Abuja, writes on politics, governance and the Nigerian condition.
