The Presidency has launched a scathing critique of former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar, accusing him and his aides of shifting policy positions on petrol subsidy three times within a single week.
In a strongly worded statement issued on Wednesday, Special Adviser to the President on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, argued that the conflicting remarks exposed a deep lack of a coherent economic blueprint, suggesting the opposition figure is merely exploiting public anxieties surrounding the cost of living.
The political friction erupted following a flurry of contradictory statements from Atiku’s camp regarding a proposed return of the fuel subsidy.
Initially, Atiku’s spokesperson, Paul Ibe, stated that the former Vice-President would temporarily restore the subsidy if elected to cushion citizens against economic hardship before eventually phasing it out.
However, another senior aide, Phrank Shaibu, swiftly distanced himself from that timeline, insisting that the subsidy would remain indefinitely until domestic refining capacity expanded and market forces stabilized.
Atiku himself later stepped into the fray to declare that his stance had remained unchanged, maintaining that he would introduce a “targeted subsidy” to restore purchasing power to Nigerians.
Dismissing these reconciliatory remarks as mere semantics, Onanuga asserted that the back-and-forth represented serious policy confusion.
The presidential aide specifically challenged the feasibility of Atiku’s core argument—that combining a subsidy with increased market competition would automatically slash pump prices.
He emphasized that local pump prices are bound by volatile global realities, including international crude oil prices, exchange rates, distribution logistics, and refining costs, which cannot be magically neutralized by competition alone.
Onanuga further accused the Atiku camp of oversimplifying Nigeria’s complex inflationary crisis by reducing it exclusively to the cost of petrol.
While conceding that energy expenses heavily impact food pricing, he highlighted a broader web of structural drivers, such as chronic agricultural insecurity, exchange rate fluctuations, storage bottlenecks, and logistics challenges.
He stressed that any credible economic recovery plan must address these multifaceted factors rather than lean on populist shortcuts.
Challenging the former Vice-President to provide concrete details, the Presidency demanded full transparency on how the proposed “targeted subsidy” would actually operate.
Onanuga questioned the mechanics of the policy, pressing Atiku to explicitly outline how much the intervention would cost, who would benefit, how those beneficiaries would be accurately identified, and what specific macroeconomic indicators would trigger its eventual removal.
He warned that replacing the previous opaque subsidy regime with a similarly vague alternative would jeopardize the fiscal health currently enjoyed by the three tiers of government.
Concluding the critique, Onanuga also scrutinized Atiku’s suggestion that the proposed subsidy would “follow the barrel of crude,” noting that crude oil yields multiple by-products like diesel, aviation fuel, and kerosene—accounting for well over half of a barrel’s output.
He questioned whether the proposed discounted crude allocation would subsidize all related domestic fuel products or unfairly allow refiners to profit off by-products while state support is narrowly locked onto petrol. “The economy is too serious for policy somersaults, incoherence, destructive populism and election gimmicks,” Onanuga warned.
