The Subsidy Mirage: An Open Letter to Atiku Abubakar

By Boma Lilian Braide (Esq.)

Alhaji Atiku Abubakar GCON, let us dispense with the polite diplomatic courtesies that usually cushion men of your stature from the realities of the Nigerian street. It comes not as ink on paper but as the unfiltered frustration of citizens watching your political calculations from the ground floor of survival; the vulcanizer whose compressor sits idle, the mother whose soup pot runs empty, the commuter who now treks miles because transport fares have become a luxury few can afford.

You are not a stranger to power or to the machinery that produces it. You are one of few Nigerians alive today who have spent as long inside the corridors of governance, first as vice president and then as a perennial contender for the highest office in the land. That record affords you a measure of respect, and it also invites a higher standard of scrutiny, because a leader who has campaigned on economic reform for this long should not need reminding of what consistency looks like.

There is a fundamental question that your decades in public life have never quite answered. Is your enduring ambition for the presidency driven by a genuine commitment to the welfare of ordinary Nigerians, or is it, at its core, a personal quest to finally hold the office that has eluded you through several attempts? Nigerians deserve an honest answer, because your recent posture on fuel subsidy suggests the latter may be closer to the truth.

Cast your mind back to the 2022 campaign trail. You stood before Nigerians and described the fuel subsidy regime as a grand criminality, a fiscal cancer consuming the nation’s finances. You promised full deregulation from your first day in office, insisting that only market forces could rescue a petroleum sector hollowed out by corruption and cross border smuggling. It was a position consistent with decades of economic orthodoxy in Nigeria, one shared by technocrats and multilateral institutions alike, and it earned you credibility as a reform minded candidate.

Yet as the 2027 political season takes shape, that conviction appears to have evaporated. You now suggest, in one form or another, that subsidy could return under your watch. This is not a minor recalibration; it is a reversal of the very economic philosophy on which you built your candidacy. Nigerians are entitled to ask what changed, apart from the political calendar.

This would matter less if subsidy removal itself were the central grievance. It is not. Most Nigerians, however weary, understand that a scheme which allowed a well connected cartel of importers and cross border smugglers to siphon trillions of naira from public coffers was never sustainable. What has broken the nation’s patience is not the removal but its aftermath. The savings from that painful decision have disappeared into government overheads, questionable allocations and a lifestyle among the political class that bears no relation to the hardship outside the villa gates. Nigerians paid the price of reform without seeing its dividends, and that is the wound your subsidy promise reopens rather than heals.

Nigeria has been here before. The country’s flirtation with subsidy removal stretches back through the Obasanjo and Jonathan years, culminating in the January 2012 fuel price protests that paralysed the nation for weeks under the banner of Occupy Nigeria.

Under President Buhari, a partial deregulation attempt in 2016 met similar resistance and was quietly diluted within years. Each cycle has followed a familiar script; removal, public anger, partial reversal, and eventually a return to the subsidy regime under a different name. The administration that removed subsidy in 2023 has, in important respects, repeated the errors of its predecessors by failing to convert the savings into visible relief for ordinary households. To answer that failure with a promise to restore the very regime that enabled decades of corruption is not a solution. It is a retreat into a cycle Nigeria can no longer afford, economically or politically, and one that a leader with your institutional memory should be the first to resist rather than revive.

What the street is demanding is not nostalgia but accountability. Nigerians want to know, in verifiable terms, where the trillions saved from subsidy removal have gone, and they want a credible plan for converting those savings into functioning mass transit, stable power for local markets and support for domestic refining. A political position built on reversing a painful reform, rather than fixing its execution, offers no such plan. It merely trades one government’s mismanagement for the memory of another’s.

As one of the most prominent voices opposed to the sitting government, you carried the weight of considerable public expectation. When the current administration’s poorly sequenced reforms plunged households into hardship, Nigerians did not look to you to mirror that failure.

They looked for an alternative grounded in competence, someone who could say, credibly, here is how the poor are protected while the books are balanced. What has been offered instead is a promise to turn back the clock, which suggests a preference for winning an election over solving the problem that election is meant to address.

If the ambition is genuinely to lead Nigeria out of this hardship, there is a more difficult but more honest path available. Rather than reviving the subsidy, a credible alternative government could compel the country’s expanding domestic refining capacity, including the Dangote refinery and the revamped state owned refineries, to sell to Nigerians on a transparent, cost plus basis that strips out the shipping and trading margins currently baked into the price at the pump. It could tie state allocations from the Federation Account to measurable investment in Compressed Natural Gas buses and rural transport corridors, independently audited and publicly reported. It could extend solar power grants to informal markets, easing the double burden of expensive fuel and an unreliable national grid on artisans, traders and small manufacturers. And it could direct subsidy savings toward rail infrastructure and farm to market roads that would do more to lower food prices over time than any subsidy has ever managed.

None of this is radical. These are the kind of structural commitments Nigerians have been asking their leaders, across party lines, to make for well over a decade. What they require is not a new idea but the political courage to defend a difficult policy rather than abandon it the moment it becomes electorally inconvenient. It also requires honesty about trade offs . Any credible alternative to subsidy will still ask something of citizens in the short term, whether in patience, in taxation, or in the slower pace of infrastructure delivery. A leader who cannot make that case plainly has not offered an alternative at all, only a different flavour of the same evasion.

There is also a responsibility that belongs to the electorate, not only to the politician. Nigerians have, in past cycles, rewarded whichever candidate promised the softest landing, only to find that soft promises rarely survive contact with the treasury. A more demanding citizenry, one that asks how a promise will be paid for and sustained, is itself part of the correction this moment requires.

Nigeria’s patience with promises that shift with the political weather has worn thin. The country has lived through enough cycles of removal and restoration to recognise a familiar pattern when it sees one, and it is no longer inclined to trade its hardship for applause. What it needs, from any leader seeking its mandate in 2027, is a position that survives contact with the ballot box unchanged. Anything less is simply politics as usual, dressed up as relief.