HOW THE ATIKU-AMAECHI TICKET PLANS TO RESCUE NIGERIA FROM TINUBU’S ECONOMIC ARSON
By: Sopriala Membere, Columnist, Scholar and Member, CRA Advocacy Network
There is a particular cruelty in economic policies that punish the poor while pretending to liberate them. On May 29, 2023, President Bola Tinubu stood at Eagle Square and, with a single sentence, “subsidy is gone”—unleashed a shockwave that has since consumed the livelihoods of millions of ordinary Nigerians. The price of petrol tripled overnight from approximately ₦200 to ₦617 per litre, and has since climbed past ₦1,300. Inflation surged to 34% by late 2024, which prompted a rebasing of figures to cover up the effect on the poor and the whimsical implementation of the subsidy removal policy. Food inflation averaged 32%, and the poverty rate climbed from less than 40% to between 61% in 2024 and 63% in 2025, pushing an additional four million Nigerians into destitution in less than two years. The IMF, while praising the “structural reform,” quietly noted that the Tinubu government had partially reversed the subsidy removal by capping retail fuel and electricity prices, implementing civil service wage awards, and suspending VAT on diesel—an admission that the so-called shock therapy had inflicted more pain than the economy could bear.
Yet the most devastating indictment lies not in the poverty statistics but in the government’s own accounts: the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) recorded approximately ₦4.84 trillion in “Energy Security Expenses” in 2023 and ₦7.13 trillion in 2024—figures that raise the unavoidable question of whether subsidy was truly abolished, or merely renamed and buried in opaque ledger entries.
This is the context in which the Atiku Economic Recovery Plan (AERP) must be understood—not as a retreat from reform, but as a rejection of economic sadism masquerading as an economic policy. Atiku Abubakar, presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress, has proposed something that sounds heretical in Nigerian policy circles: a production subsidy that follows the barrel from crude allocation through refining to the Nigerian consumer. “We will move subsidy from importation to production, from middlemen to Nigerian refineries, and from unverifiable claims to verifiable barrels,” he declared. The philosophy is elegantly simple. Under the AERP, qualifying public and private Nigerian refineries would receive domestic crude at preferential prices to be paid in Naira, subject to strict production, efficiency, transparency, and domestic-supply conditions in line with the PIA. No refinery would receive subsidised crude without independently verified proof that corresponding petroleum products are supplied to the Nigerian market under a transparent pricing formula. Crude allocation, refinery intake, production yields, inventories, and domestic deliveries would be reconciled. Every subsidised barrel would be traceable from allocation to the pump.
This is not a return to the old subsidy regime; it is its antithesis. The old regime subsidised consumption—paying marketers for imported petroleum products that often existed only on paper, creating an over ₦3.5 trillion annual drain that benefited middlemen more than motorists and ordinary Nigerian commuters. The AERP subsidises productivity—lowering the cost of domestic refining so that Nigerian crude is refined in Nigeria, by Nigerians, for Nigerians. It is the difference between feeding a parasite and nourishing a patient.
The case for this approach has never been more urgent, and the Dangote Refinery crisis illustrates why. Here is a $20 billion, 650,000-barrel-per-day facility—the single largest private industrial investment in sub-Saharan African history—starving for feedstock in a country that exports crude oil. Between October 2025 and March 2026, Dangote received only 29.21 million barrels against a requirement of 108.74 million, a supply performance of just 26.9 percent. The refinery was compelled to import foreign crude valued at $3.74 billion from Brazil, the United States, and Algeria—imports conducted in dollars that further eroded the naira and contradicted the very logic of local refining. Meanwhile, the Petroleum Industry Act’s Domestic Crude Oil Supply Obligation, which empowers the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission to require upstream producers to make crude available to domestic refineries, has faced significant implementation and compliance roadblocks under the Tinubu regime. Domestic refiners have repeatedly complained of difficulties in securing adequate crude supplies, despite Nigeria’s substantial crude production and the government’s stated commitment to deepening domestic refining capacity.
At the downstream end, it is the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA) that has been accused in court filings of continuing to issue or renew fuel import licences to NNPC and other marketers, despite claims that domestic refining capacity can meet a substantial share of national demand. This is not the competitive market Nigeria was promised. It is a system structurally tilted towards import dependence, even as domestic refining capacity expands. And it is precisely this broken system that the Atiku Economic Recovery Plan is designed to dismantle.
Atiku’s plan addresses the Dangote dilemma with surgical precision. By making subsidised crude contingent on verified domestic supply, it eliminates the arbitrage that has made importation more profitable than refining. By capping the annual fiscal exposure and subjecting it to National Assembly appropriation and independent audit, it ends the culture of open-ended liabilities. And by progressively reducing support per barrel as domestic capacity expands and production costs decline, it builds a subsidy designed to disappear—a bridge to self-sufficiency rather than a permanent crutch.
But policy, however elegant, requires execution. And this is where Rotimi Amaechi’s presence on the ADC ticket transforms the AERP from a white paper into a credible prospectus. Amaechi is not a theoretician; he is a builder with a documented capacity to translate executive policies into concrete outcomes. As Minister of Transportation from 2015 to 2022, he conceived and executed the $195 million Deep Blue Project that reduced piracy in Nigerian waters by over 80%. He initiated the rehabilitation of the 1,443-kilometre Port Harcourt-Maiduguri Eastern Narrow Gauge Railway, secured the new Port Harcourt-to-Owerri branch line through Elele, completed the Warri-Itakpe standard gauge railway with its spur to the Ajaokuta steel complex, established the Kajola Wagon Assembly Plant in Ogun State as the anchor of a backward-integration strategy for domestic rolling-stock manufacturing, approved inland dry ports in Kano in Dala, Kaduna, and Isiala Ngwa to decongest the seaports and drive hinterland commerce, and laid the strategic groundwork for the Kano-Maradi railway. He obtained approvals for the Bonny Deep Sea Port and the $241 million Railway Industrial Park in Port Harcourt. He improved the Eastern Port Complex—including Onne, Calabar, Warri, and Port Harcourt—and introduced harbour dues incentives that drew vessels back to the eastern seaboard. Even the APC, which now campaigns on these projects, cannot fault the man’s implementation capacity without exposing its own hypocrisy.
As Vice President, Amaechi would chair the National Economic Council—a constitutional body mandated to advise the President on economic affairs and coordinate federal and state economic planning. Under Vice President Kashim Shettima, the NEC has been largely ceremonial, convening for photos and routine meetings while the economy burns. Shettima’s NEC speaks the language of bureaucratic process; Amaechi’s would speak the language of project delivery. The difference is not merely stylistic; it is the difference between a council that coordinates PowerPoint presentations and one that coordinates execution of policies.
The global precedent for production subsidies is well-established, and Nigeria need not reinvent the wheel. Indonesia, under President Joko Widodo, faced a comparable dilemma: fuel subsidies consumed up to 20% of the annual budget, stifling development spending. Between 2014 and 2015, Widodo removed subsidies—but did so gradually, coupling the phase-out with targeted cash transfers to 15.5 million poor households and reallocating savings to infrastructure, education, and health. Brazil, in the mid-2000s, eliminated transport and industrial fuel subsidies last, after first targeting household consumption, thereby protecting productive sectors from cost shocks that would have crippled manufacturing and agriculture. India has long subsidised fertiliser and electricity for agricultural production rather than for general consumption, recognising that supporting productivity lowers end-user prices more sustainably than suppressing retail costs. The Atiku plan draws from these precedents but adds a distinctly Nigerian innovation: the insistence that every subsidised barrel must be accounted for, that no refinery can pocket the benefit without passing it to consumers by design, and that the fiscal ceiling is legally binding.
The contrast with the Tinubu regime’s approach could not be starker. Tinubu announced a policy without having a plan and without proper forecasting done to prepare for the impact. He imposed market-level pump prices while Federation accounts simultaneously bore petroleum-related costs that remain “insufficiently explained.” Atiku proposes to define the intervention, establish the ceiling, appropriate the money, track the crude, verify the production, guarantee the consumer benefit, publish the accounts, and progressively reduce the subsidy. It is the difference between a surgeon who measures the incision and a butcher who swings the cleaver.
For the ordinary Nigerian, the mathematics of the AERP translate into something visceral and immediate. Lower transportation costs for commuters and farmers. Lower energy and logistics costs for manufacturers and traders. Falling production costs that moderate inflation and restore purchasing power. More Jobs in refineries that will come on stream just by this policy. And, ultimately, a trajectory toward energy self-sufficiency that ends the absurdity of Africa’s largest oil exporter importing petroleum products.
The 2027 election will present Nigerians with a choice that transcends party labels. It is a choice between two economic ideologies. One believes that the poor must bleed before the economy can heal—that shock therapy, however brutal, is the only path to fiscal recovery. The other believes that reform must be sequenced, measured, and productive—that you cannot build a refining industry by starving it of affordable and available feedstock, that you cannot claim to have ended subsidy while burying its costs in opaque accounts, and that you cannot campaign on railways built by a man you now seek to erase from history, because you have nothing tangible to show.
Rotimi Amaechi, whatever one thinks of his political wanderings, has built things that endure. Railways that carry passengers. Ports that receive vessels. Naval colleges that train officers. Refunds that returned ₦78.5 billion to Rivers State. And a security architecture that reduced piracy by 90 percent. The APC knows this. That is why it campaigns with his projects while pretending he had nothing to do with them. As Vice President, Amaechi would bring this implementation DNA to the National Economic Council, transforming it from a talking shop into an execution chamber for national development in line with the vision and policy direction of Atiku Abubakar.
The Atiku-Amaechi ticket offers Nigeria something rare: a policy that is simultaneously compassionate and rigorous, interventionist and fiscally disciplined. It recognises that the choice is not between subsidy and no subsidy, but between an opaque intervention that breeds waste and a disciplined instrument that delivers measurable benefits. It understands that Nigeria’s crude should first help build Nigerian refining capacity and Nigerian prosperity. And it knows that the ultimate subsidy is not the one paid at the pump, but the one paid to productivity—the investment in domestic capacity that eventually makes subsidy unnecessary.
President Tinubu told Nigerians that the subsidy was gone. What he did not tell them was that poverty, inflation, opaque energy costs and reckless, unaccounted-for public expenditure would rush in to take its place.
The Atiku–Amaechi alternative is not to resurrect the failures of the old regime, but to replace it with something better: a subsidy that follows the barrel, a refining industry that creates jobs for Nigerians, and an economic council that does more than deliberate—it delivers.
That is not another campaign promise. It is a blueprint for national recovery. In the coming weeks and months, the Atiku–Amaechi Campaign will release further policy papers, position documents and, ultimately, its manifesto, setting out in greater detail how these policy proposals will be implemented and translated into measurable outcomes for Nigerians and investors