Atiku Abubakar’s latest petroleum proposal may sound disciplined because it is dressed in words such as “cap”, “audit”, “track” and “sunset”, but the central idea remains the same: government takes resources that could otherwise accrue to the Federation and uses them to make petroleum cheaper for consumers or refiners. Calling it a “production subsidy” does not change its economic character. Atiku himself admits that supplying crude below its market-equivalent value carries an opportunity cost to the Federation. The real question, therefore, is not whether the subsidy will be called “targeted” or “transparent”, but whether Nigeria can afford to repeat a policy that has historically created enormous fiscal liabilities while governments struggled to verify who actually benefited.
More importantly, Atiku’s argument that President Bola Tinubu simply “abolished subsidy and left Nigerians with the bill” ignores what has actually happened to the public finances. The Federal Government says subsidy removal, together with the foreign-exchange reform, generated ₦15.8 trillion in additional resources for the Federation between June 2023 and December 2025. Of that amount, ₦5.4 trillion accrued to the Federal Government, while ₦10.4 trillion was distributed to states and local governments. Crucially, the ₦15.8 trillion was not subsidy savings alone; the government says it reflected the combined effect of subsidy removal and FX reforms. Atiku therefore cannot honestly present the entire ₦15.8 trillion—or his broader ₦30 trillion figure—as a giant subsidy windfall sitting somewhere in Abuja waiting to be accounted for.
The ₦30 trillion claim itself requires greater precision. Atiku has described it as an aggregate of Federation revenues, deductions, savings, transfers and related funds requiring reconciliation. That is materially different from alleging that ₦30 trillion was saved from subsidy removal or that ₦30 trillion is missing. Even the reports carrying his demand make that distinction clear. The better argument, therefore, is to demand transparent reconciliation of every major Federation deduction—not to create the impression that the government possesses a hidden ₦30 trillion subsidy account. Public accountability is legitimate; financial conflation is not.
Atiku’s proposed preferential-crude model also collides with the practical problem Nigeria is already struggling to solve: crude availability and commercial pricing. Nigeria already has a Domestic Crude Supply Obligation under the Petroleum Industry Act, yet domestic refineries have continued to experience supply problems. In the first quarter of 2026, only 28.5 million barrels were actually delivered to domestic refineries against 61.9 million barrels allocated. The situation improved sharply in Q2, when domestic refineries received 53.7 million barrels, but the figures still demonstrate that putting a rule on paper does not automatically produce barrels at the right price, quality and time. Atiku’s proposal therefore risks subsidising a problem whose fundamental bottleneck is not simply the price of crude, but the functioning of the entire upstream-to-refinery supply chain.
There is another uncomfortable question Atiku does not adequately answer: who ultimately pays when government sells crude below its market value? The refinery may receive cheaper feedstock, but the Federation loses revenue or bears an opportunity cost. If crude prices rise sharply, the fiscal cost rises. If production falls, the government has less revenue with which to finance the intervention. If the naira depreciates, imported inputs, equipment, financing and other refinery costs can still push pump prices upward. Nigeria has already experienced the difficulty of trying to make a refinery commercially viable while simultaneously guaranteeing cheap fuel. In July 2026, even the Dangote refinery began pricing some local fuel sales in dollars, citing crude-supply constraints and rising global oil prices. That reality exposes the weakness in the simplistic promise that cheaper crude automatically means permanently cheaper petrol.
Atiku is also wrong to suggest that the existence of NNPCL’s “energy security expenses” by itself proves that subsidy was secretly resurrected. The ₦4.844 trillion recorded in 2023 and ₦7.131 trillion in 2024 are real figures cited from NNPCL’s audited accounts, but the economic composition of those expenses must be established before they are labelled subsidy. Reporting on the accounts indicates that the costs were substantially connected to exchange-rate differences associated with petrol imports and settlement arrangements. That deserves scrutiny, certainly. But scrutiny is not the same thing as proof. Atiku should distinguish between legitimate questions about NNPCL’s accounts and the political convenience of declaring every petroleum-related fiscal cost a disguised subsidy.
The fundamental weakness of Atiku’s proposal is that Nigeria does not need another beautifully worded subsidy regime; it needs a petroleum market that can survive without permanent government intervention. The stronger alternative is to enforce domestic crude obligations, increase oil production, remove supply bottlenecks, strengthen competition among refineries, publish crude allocations and transactions, and allow efficient refineries to compete while protecting consumers through targeted social and transport interventions rather than subsidising the commodity itself. Tinubu’s subsidy removal undeniably imposed severe short-term pain, and government must be judged on how effectively it converts the resulting fiscal space into lower inflation, infrastructure, jobs and improved living standards. But replacing one subsidy architecture with another—and calling it “targeted”—does not constitute reform. Nigeria’s lesson should be to make the petroleum sector commercially viable, transparent and competitive, not to teach government a new way of paying the subsidy bill.
