Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has hit back at President Bola Tinubu over his criticism of Atiku’s proposal to intervene in the petroleum sector, accusing the President of economic ignorance.
Tinubu had described Atiku’s promise to restore fuel subsidy if elected in 2027 as evidence of “serious ignorance on governance and the economy.”
Responding through his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, Atiku described Tinubu’s comment as the “insolent sermon of a failed economic experimenter” who mistakes Nigerians’ ability to endure hardship for proof that his policies are working.
Shaibu said, “If economic ignorance had a presidential seal, Tinubu and his family would be its official logo.”
He accused the administration of triggering fuel-price, exchange-rate and cost-of-living shocks that have made Nigerians poorer, adding: “That is not reform. It is economic arson followed by propaganda about the ashes.”
According to Atiku, increased FAAC allocations cannot compensate for rising hardship.
“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,” he said.
He argued that changing economic conditions require new policy responses, insisting that Atiku was not proposing a return to the “corrupt, open-ended subsidy bazaar,” but a “targeted, capped, budgeted, time-bound and independently audited production-support mechanism.”
Atiku also questioned the claim that subsidy had been completely removed, citing reported energy-security costs and petroleum under-recoveries in NNPC’s accounts.
“So what exactly did Tinubu remove?” he asked. “If subsidy is dead, why are under-recoveries alive?”
He added that subsidy removal had shifted the burden from households to government treasuries.
“You do not build a federation by impoverishing citizens so that Abuja can send bigger cheques to governors. That is robbing households to sub
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