TD While ADC Presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar promising to reinstate fuel subsidy may appeal to some, the honest truth is that he is proving he is everything Nigeria doesn’t need at the moment.
The late President Buhari’s confusion was very clearly highlighted in an article I wrote 10 years ago bemoaning how we had been turned to lab rats for his subsidy removal and reinstatement experiments.
If Atiku was promising to remove fuel subsidy in 2023 and is now promising to reinstate it then the man doesn’t quite understand the problem which is the very first step towards solving it.
We can’t afford to allow anyone gamble our destinies away. At least not now.
The fact that prominent Nigerians are now owning refineries in obscure countries abroad should be enough illustration of how lucrative fuel importation is to those involved (directly or indirectly) and the magnitude of the forces that will sabotage any genuine effort to fix our refineries or get Dangote to refine and sell our oil to us at a reasonable price.
Fuel subsidy may have existed since the ’70s in Nigeria, but the economic reality now is different from what it was then.
India, Brazil and even our African brothers Morrocco are good examples of countries that have removed subsidy and are much better off.
In some cases, it was gradual and structured, but they never got confused and lost the plot like Mr Abubakar is already doing outside office.
Subsidy has primarily existed in these times for us because we have become a fuel importing nation despite being oil-producing.
To put it less subtly, we have become a huge joke.
Professional analysis puts current fuel price if our 4 refineries were operational amidst the current global oil price shock at N750-N950 per litre instead of N1,100-N1,300 which in effect means we would be buying fuel at about N500 under normal circumstances.
The emphasis should be on refining fuel in Nigeria and eliminating astronomical costs in the form of heavy vessel freight charges, marine insurance, foreign port demurrage and import duties.
It is really that simple.
Politicians always wax righteous and express eagerness at solving this ‘little’ problem, but they get into power and realize the easy billions of dollars to be made by importing fuel and allocating money for ‘maintaining’ perpetually non-functional refineries.
Going by what Tinubu said when he became President, all of our refineries should be up and running by now.
So far, he has spent $2.8bn on 4 refineries that refine a total of 445k barrels per day to zero effect.
A 400k barrels per day refinery can be built today at an average cost of $6bn which simply means what he has spent on our 4 refineries is roughly half the sum needed to build a single refinery with just about their entire refining capacity.
The problem in 2026 Nigeria is not subsidy, it is why we are still importing fuel.
What makes what Atiku has said totally out of order is the fact that in this same country, there is a 650k barrels per day Dangote refinery which is fixated also on refining and exporting to other nations.
What that means is that we have a lot of leverage.
If we pass a new law governing private refineries today preventing him from accessing crude being shipped in and also hinder him from exporting petroleum products in addition to drowning him in taxes, as a businessman he would have to agree to selling fuel to us at an affordable price.
That is what any government truly concerned about the welfare of its people would do and primarily why President Tinubu has failed us inexcusably.
That also should be the main talking point for Atiku not subsidizing fuel.
Though unsubstantiated reports indicate we save up to N10trn annually due to subsidy removal, the official figure given by the Ministry of Finance is that we have saved N15.8trn from June 2023 to December 2025.
That is a whole lot, and it is only truly a matter of whether or not that money has been deployed to good use.
No doubt the merits of fuel subsidy removal far out-weigh its reinstatement.
Governments are supposed to be performing optimally with much less borrowing, but it is sad that in Nigeria today we are being subjected to immense suffering simply because government is deliberately choosing to over-look the simple reason fuel is too expensive in the first place which is importation costs.
Umar Sa’ad Hassan is based in Kano; Twitter: @Alaye_100; Email: uhassan077@gmail.com.
