By Sopriala Membere Columnist, Scholar and Member CRA Advocacy Network
There is a particular and more recent genre of Nigerian political commentary that mistakes cynicism for sophistication, and Bayo Olupohunda’s recent intervention in TheCable is a masterclass in the form. It wears the costume of hard-headed realism—the raised eyebrow, the knowing sigh, the demand for “tough questions”—while performing a sleight of hand so brazen that the trick almost announces itself, if you get the drift.
Mr Olupohunda wants us to believe that Atiku Abubakar’s policy offerings are a “promise bonanza,” a “chicken in every pot” fantasy unworthy of serious scrutiny. But the truly revealing question is not whether Atiku’s promises are too many; it is why Olupohunda applies a forensic microscope to the opposition’s policy documents while handing the incumbent a pass for the three years of well-documented economic carnage faced by the ordinary Nigerian.
Let us begin with the “chicken in every pot” analogy, because Olupohunda deploys it with the confidence of a man who assumes his readers have no memory. Herbert Hoover promised prosperity in 1928 and delivered the Great Depression. The analogy, if we are to use it honestly, fits the incumbent Tinubu regime far more snugly. In 2023, Bola Tinubu promised Nigerians “Renewed Hope,” steady electricity, and an end to insecurity. He staked his re-election on constant power supply, declaring: “If I do not provide steady electricity in my first four years, do not vote for me for a second term.” Two years later, the national grid collapsed 12 times in 2025 alone, electricity tariffs have risen by 240 %, and 90 million Nigerians remain in darkness.
If Olupohunda is hunting for reckless promises made by men who “know Nigerians suffer collective amnesia,” he might start with the man currently occupying Aso Rock, who promised
security and delivered a nation where kidnapping and terror attacks have become an industry.
But let us turn to the substance, because Olupohunda does raise questions that deserve answers—provided they are asked with intellectual honesty. On subsidy, he cites the World Bank and IMF as though their endorsement of removal were an endorsement of Tinubu’s execution of the Policy. This is either lazy or disingenuous.
The World Bank’s June 2023 report explicitly warned that without compensating transfers, an additional 7.1 million Nigerians would be pushed into poverty by subsidy removal. It stressed that “compensating transfers will be essential in helping to shield ordinary Nigerian households from the initial price impacts.” Where were those transfers? The Tinubu regime’s own scorecard, released in August 2026, reveals that of the ₦30.64 trillion in incremental expenditure over 30 months, only ₦423.8 billion went to social welfare transfers—a paltry 1.4 percent, which still can’t even be verified independently to date.
Meanwhile, ₦9.39 trillion went to wage adjustments for public servants, ₦9.37 trillion to external debt servicing, and 6.47 trillion to infrastructure. The federal government spent ₦150 for every ₦100 it generated in additional resources, funding the gap through borrowing. So when Olupohunda asks where Atiku’s subsidy money will come from, he might first ask where Tinubu’s “savings” went.
Olupohunda complains that Atiku has not “shown the numbers” for his production subsidy plan. This is simply false. The Atiku Economic Recovery Plan, released in August 2026, is the most detailed policy presser issued by any presidential candidate in this cycle.
It specifies an annual fiscal ceiling approved through the federal budget; independent audit of every subsidised barrel; traceability from crude allocation through refining to the pump; a transparent pricing formula ensuring refineries pass benefits to consumers; statutory sunset provisions; and progressive reduction benchmarks as domestic capacity expands. It is a plan designed to prevent precisely the “phantom cargoes” and “fictitious imports” that made the old regime unsustainable. Tinubu, by contrast, removed subsidy with a three-word sentence at Eagle Square and spent the next three years explaining why ₦ 20.64 trillion in “Energy Security Expenses” in 3 years does not constitute subsidy by another name.
On student loans, Olupohunda asks who qualifies for forgiveness and how much it will cost. Fair questions—but they assume NELFUND is functioning. It is not. The program has disbursed loans to a fraction of applicants, trapped students in bureaucratic limbo, and failed to address the structural crisis of university funding. Atiku’s proposal to review and forgive debts for qualifying students is a response to a failing program, not a reckless giveaway.
The $10 billion startup financing programme draws Olupohunda’s scepticism, and again he asks: where will it come from? It is a financing programme, not a cash bonfire. It involves budgetary allocation, private-sector partnership, and foreign capital mobilisation—the same mechanisms by which every modern economy funds industrial and economic policy. But since Olupohunda is in an arithmetic mood, he might apply the same question to Tinubu’s ₦6.47 trillion “strategic infrastructure” spending, 58 percent of which was funded not by savings but by borrowing. Or he might ask where the N30 trillion in Federation revenues, deductions, and transfers requiring reconciliation has disappeared to—a question Atiku has raised and Tinubu has not answered.
On insecurity, Olupohunda scoffs at Atiku’s pledge to tackle it within a year, noting that “we have heard this before.” Indeed we have. President Tinubu heard it from himself. The difference is that Atiku’s plan involves recruitment, equipment, and economic opportunity for youth.
But Olupohunda’s deeper error is conflating a campaign commitment with a policy blueprint. Atiku is not claiming to wave a wand; he is outlining a security architecture grounded in personnel, technology, economic intervention and a Vice President who has the reputation
to support such vision going by his his track record of dismantling militancy and maritime insecurity as Governor and Minister, respectively.
After three years of Tinubu, during which banditry has metastasised even into a New terrorist organisation and the presidency’s own response to criticism is to cite “15,000 terrorists taken off the streets” while citizens still cannot travel safely between Abuja and Kaduna, one would think Olupohunda would reserve his scepticism for the incumbent Tinubu regime.
The border argument is perhaps the most embarrassing. Olupohunda claims Tinubu has already reopened the borders, so what is Atiku promising? This is a straw man constructed from straw. Atiku’s promise is not merely to “open” borders but to develop southern ports—Onne, Calabar, Warri—to reduce the catastrophic congestion at Lagos ports and redirect trade through the eastern seaboard. This is a structural economic proposal, and the fact that Olupohunda reduces the context of that statement to merely mean ceremonial opening suggests that he is either unfamiliar with the policy or deliberately trivialising it.
Then there is the Oronsaye Report, which Olupohunda concedes is “the most valid” of Atiku’s promises but immediately qualifies with the difficulty of implementation. Here, finally, is something we can agree on: merging agencies is hard.
But who has done it before? Atiku, as Vice President and Chairman of the National Economic Council, oversaw the consolidation of 89 banks into 25 robust institutions with a minimum capital base of ₦25 billion—a reform that laid the foundation for a stabilised Nigerian financial sector.
He created the EFCC and ICPC. He knows how to execute difficult reforms because he has done it. Tinubu has had three years to touch Oronsaye report meaningfully and has done the exact opposite, running the largest redundant cabinet in the history of Nigeria’s 4th republic. Experience, in this case, is not a campaign slogan; it is the difference between knowing how to navigate difficult policy choices and being paralysed by it.
Which brings us to Olupohunda’s final, and most intellectually lazy, argument: that Atiku is “desperate” because he has spent decades seeking the presidency. This is a curious standard. Tinubu spent decades seeking and positioning himself for the presidency. Every serious politician in a thriving democracy spends years building toward his ambition. The relevant question is not how long one has sought power but what one did with the power one already held. Atiku was Vice President for 8 years, during which he chaired the National Economic Council that delivered Nigeria’s highest and most consistent GDP growth of over 6 % per annum, was part of an administration that paid off Nigeria’s foreign debt, and introduced the GSM revolution that expanded telephone lines from 100,000 to over 100 million. He has a record. Tinubu, before 2023, had Lagos State. And after three years in Aso Rock, he has delivered a poverty rate of 64% in 2026 and still on the rise, affecting 141 million Nigerians; inflation that has ravaged purchasing power; and a fiscal deficit of ₦10.24 trillion, all whilst running overlapping budget cycles concurrently—an institutional absurdity by every standard.
Olupohunda concludes that “campaign promises are cheap” and “governing is not.” He is right. Governing is hard. Which is precisely why Nigerians should elect a team that has already governed at the highest level and delivered measurable outcomes, rather than someone whose governing experience before 2023 was limited to a single state and whose national record is a litany of collapsed grids, empty treasuries, budgetary absurdities, fake agencies, and unexplained expenditure in trillions. Atiku’s “promise bonanza” is not a suitor’s fantasy; it is a policy architecture built on a documented history of economic management. Tinubu’s “Renewed Hope” was the fantasy—and Nigerians are living its nightmare.
It is instructive to remember that the most dangerous thing an opposition candidate can offer to citizens desperately seeking an alternative is not a promise too many, but a record too solid to dismiss. When promises are set against a demonstrable record, the debate ceases to be about rhetoric and becomes a question of performance. And that, Mr. Olupohunda, is why the ADC ticket frightens those who would rather critique promises than account for failures.