The Presidency has renewed its warning against former Vice President Atiku Abubakar’s proposal to restore fuel subsidy if elected president in 2027, arguing that reviving the old regime would financially cripple the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC).
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Special Adviser to the President on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, has repeatedly pushed back on the ADC presidential candidate’s pledge, describing it as “retrogressive” and accusing Atiku of political desperation ahead of the 2027 election. “Even though he used to believe that the subsidy regime must be eliminated, a point he canvassed in the run-up to his defeat in the 2023 election, he has now opportunistically recanted the major plank of his economic doctrine and turned a renegade,” Onanuga said.
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Onanuga has stressed that the old subsidy arrangement wasn’t simply money sitting in government coffers waiting to be handed out, but rather a system in which NNPC sold fuel below cost — buying at higher prices and selling at the pump for far less — resulting in massive under-recovery and losses. “It is the massive discount the NNPC offered the Nigerian government: selling fuel it bought at N100 at N50 at the pump, leading to under-recovery of costs and massive losses,” he said, adding that trillions of naira in unpaid subsidy costs remain on NNPC’s books to this day. He also dismissed Atiku’s claim of a N30 trillion subsidy “windfall” as having no basis in fact.
Background: subsidy removal and its aftermath
President Bola Tinubu scrapped the fuel subsidy in May 2023, a move that triggered a sharp spike in petrol prices but was framed by the administration as a necessary reform under the Petroleum Industry Act, which had already mandated the subsidy’s removal by the end of June 2023 — with Tinubu only accelerating the timeline by a few weeks. Finance Minister Taiwo Oyedele has said the government received roughly N15.8 trillion in subsidy savings but spent N30.64 trillion on incremental expenditures between June 2023 and December 2025.
Atiku, for his part, has proposed a new model he calls the Atiku Economic Recovery Plan (AERP) 2027, which he describes not as a return to the old wasteful system but as a “targeted, capped, transparently budgeted and independently audited production subsidy” designed to lower energy costs and boost domestic refining. He has argued that Tinubu’s subsidy removal policy remains “opaque” and that his own plan would shift government support toward local refining rather than fuel imports.
The Presidency has rejected that framing, insisting that any return to subsidised pricing — regardless of how it’s structured — would push NNPC back toward the financial distress that nearly rendered it insolvent before the 2023 reforms, undermining its ability to fund operations and remain a viable commercial entity.
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