Tinubu, The Issue Is Not Atiku — It Is Why Nigerians Can No Longer Afford To Live

September 01, () — Only last night, President Bola Tinubu devoted a substantial part of his latest statement, released on X, attacking the economic position of His Excellency, Atiku Abubakar, yet declined, rather theatrically, to mention him by name, claiming that he would not “dignify” opposition leaders.

Bola, Nigerians know exactly whose policy you were attacking. You were responding to Atiku Abubakar because he has chosen to stand with millions of Nigerians being crushed by the cost-of-living crisis. He has insisted that in an oil-producing country, petrol should not become a luxury product and that the ultimate test of economic policy is whether ordinary Nigerians can afford transportation, food, education, healthcare and a decent life.

Since you would rather attack his ideas without mentioning his name, His Excellency sees no reason to be dragged into a personal exchange with you. I will answer you.

Atiku has more important people to engage directly: the mother struggling to feed her children; the civil servant whose salary disappears into transportation; the farmer paying more to move produce to market; the student being pushed into debt simply to remain in school; and millions of Nigerians whose daily reality bears no resemblance to the prosperity advertised in your tweets.

And that is where the contradiction in your statement becomes impossible to ignore. You condemn Atiku’s proposal to reduce the cost of energy as a return to the past, yet in the same breath promise that, “in the next few weeks”, your government will provide cheaper transportation, increase food production and introduce relief for vulnerable Nigerians. Bola, why now?

For more than three years, Nigerians have endured punishing transport fares, soaring food prices, crippling energy costs and wages that buy less every month. Families have skipped meals, postponed medical treatment, withdrawn children from schools and abandoned basic plans simply to survive. Throughout that period, your government repeatedly told Nigerians that their suffering was the unavoidable price of reform. Now, suddenly, cheaper transportation has become urgent.

Why did Nigerians have to suffer for more than three years before your government discovered that economic growth must reach “the dining table and the pocket”? Why is intervention backward when Atiku proposes it, but progressive when you announce it? You cannot condemn cheaper living when Atiku proposes it and rename the same objective Renewed Hope when you promise it. That is not economic consistency. It is political convenience.

Atiku chose to stand with the people. That is a commitment. And, Bola, Atiku is ashamed on your behalf that Nigeria, one of Africa’s major oil-producing nations, has reached the point where ordinary citizens pay significantly more for petrol than citizens of several other oil-producing countries with substantially higher incomes and living standards.

Saudi Arabia sells petrol at about ₦778 per litre. Kuwait is around ₦872. Algeria is about ₦475. Angola is about ₦441. Even the United Arab Emirates, where average incomes are vastly higher than Nigeria’s, sells petrol below Nigeria’s roughly ₦1,400 per litre.

These countries did not conclude that oil production requires punishing citizens at the pump. In different ways, they have used their natural-resource advantage to moderate the energy burden on their people. Nigeria has turned that advantage upside down. Our people earn less, live under greater pressure and yet pay more for the fuel that drives transportation, farming, food distribution, manufacturing and virtually every aspect of daily life.

And, Bola, Atiku is particularly ashamed on your behalf when he looks at Libya. A country battered by years of political instability still sells petrol at roughly ₦34 per litre and ranks around 115th globally in human development. Nigeria sells petrol at roughly ₦1,400 per litre and ranks around 164th.

How did your celebrated reform leave Nigerians paying vastly more for fuel while enjoying a lower standard of human development? That is not merely a pump-price debate. It is an affordability scandal.

A Nigerian earning the ₦70,000 statutory minimum wage requires ₦56,000 merely to buy 40 litres of petrol at ₦1,400 per litre. That is 80 percent of an entire month’s minimum wage. Before that worker buys food, pays rent, electricity, school fees or medical bills, four-fifths of his monthly wage can disappear into just 40 litres of petrol.

Meanwhile, citizens of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE generally earn vastly more while paying less per litre. That is the human face missing from your economic argument.

And the pain does not end at the petrol station. Take the woman selling tomatoes at Mile 12. The farmer pays for energy to cultivate. A vehicle moves the tomatoes from the farm. Another truck carries them hundreds of kilometres to Lagos. The wholesaler pays transport. The retailer pays transport again. By the time those tomatoes reach the mother preparing dinner, expensive fuel has entered the final price several times over.

That is why the Atiku Economic Recovery Plan, AERP, begins with a simple principle: Reduce the cost at source instead of allowing prices to explode and then arriving with palliatives.

Under AERP, support would be targeted at Nigerian crude supplied for domestic refining within a capped, transparently budgeted and independently audited framework. The crude would be tracked. Refined products would be monitored. And the intervention would carry a clear consumer pass-through obligation so that the benefit does not stop with the refinery or marketer but reaches Nigerians at the pump.

The economics is straightforward. Reduce fuel costs and you reduce pressure on transportation. Reduce transportation costs and you reduce the cost of moving tomatoes, rice, yam, livestock and manufactured goods. Reduce those costs and more of a worker’s income remains available for food, rent, education and healthcare. That is structural relief.

It is fundamentally different from allowing living costs to explode, watching Nigerians struggle with hunger and unaffordable healthcare, and then arriving close to an election with another round of emergency handouts.

And, Bola, your attempt to use NELFUND as a shield against Atiku’s cost-of-living proposal is even more dishonest. You now want Nigerians to believe that making fuel cheaper will somehow threaten student loans, workers’ salaries and the minimum wage. That is fearmongering dressed up as economics.

Celebrating NELFUND as proof that education has become affordable under your government is like setting school fees on fire and then boasting that you lent students a bucket of water. What exactly is the wisdom in presiding over dramatic increases in school fees in some institutions, only to turn around and celebrate loans as the solution?

You make education more expensive, lend students money to survive the increase, and then demand applause for the rescue. That is not affordability. It is witchcraft economics: create the burden with one hand, offer debt with the other, and demand applause for the intervention.

The good news for Nigerian students is that Atiku has reviewed the current student-loan policy and believes education should not begin with a mountain of debt hanging over a young Nigerian’s future. His approach will reduce the underlying cost of education and, after review, provide forgiveness for qualifying student debts so that young Nigerians can graduate with hope rather than repayment burdens. Education should open doors, not mortgage the future.

A student loan is not a scholarship. It is a liability. The proper test of an education policy is whether ordinary families can educate their children without being pushed into debt merely to keep them in school. When students increasingly require loans because the underlying cost of education has become prohibitive, government should not parade the loan itself as evidence that the system is working.

And your attempt to frighten students and workers by claiming that Atiku’s targeted and capped production support will somehow destroy NELFUND, reduce salaries or reverse the minimum wage is a fallacious claim without a ledger behind it. If your government has the arithmetic, Bola, publish it. Show Nigerians, line by line, how a transparently budgeted subsidy tied to Nigerian crude and domestic refining suddenly empties NELFUND or workers’ pay packets.

Atiku’s argument is precisely the opposite. Reduce the cost of energy so that salaries buy more. Reduce transport costs so that less of a worker’s wage disappears merely getting to work. Reduce the cost of moving food so families spend less in the market. Reduce the cost of living so students spend less on upkeep and parents have more money left after food, rent and transportation.

You cannot make life painfully expensive, push students towards debt to survive the consequences, and then frighten those same students that cheaper fuel will take their loans away. Nor can you tell workers that a policy designed to restore value to their wages will somehow take those wages from them. That is not economic reform. It is scarecrow propaganda built on witchcraft economics.

And while you celebrate statistics, Nigerians still deserve answers about the enormous sums surrounding your so-called reforms. Your government says subsidy removal mobilised about ₦15.8 trillion between June 2023 and December 2025. Nigerians surrendered cheap fuel. They paid more for transportation. They paid more for food. They watched the value of their wages collapse. So what measurable improvement reached the average Nigerian household in exchange for that sacrifice?

We have also repeatedly demanded a comprehensive reconciliation of the nearly ₦30 trillion identified across Federation Account revenues, deductions, savings, transfers and related entries. If our reconciliation is wrong, publish the complete ledger and establish the facts.

There is equally the disclosure that Import Duty Exemption Certificate approvals covered about ₦34 trillion worth of imports in 2025. Nigerians deserve to know who benefited, the values attached to those exemptions, their legal basis and the measurable public benefit they delivered.

So when you suddenly announce that relief is coming “in the next few weeks,” Nigerians are entitled to ask: Why now?

The answer is becoming increasingly obvious. After more than three years of hardship, Nigerians are now being offered a temporary dose of political anaesthesia as 2027 approaches. God forbid that Nigerians should mistake election-season relief for economic recovery.

While you rest in Europe, millions of Nigerian parents lie awake at night, staring at empty cupboards and wondering how they will face their children in the morning. That is the reality on our streets.

Atiku wants to offer Nigerians more than empty figures. He has a plan that respects the dignity and protects the survival of the Nigerian people.But the questions Nigerians are asking have not gone on leave with you.

When you return, bring answers. Reconcile the Federation Account figures. Provide full transparency around the duty exemptions. Explain what Nigerians concretely received for the ₦15.8 trillion your government says subsidy removal mobilised.And explain why intervention is supposedly backward when Atiku proposes it, but miraculously becomes Renewed Hope when you announce it.

His Excellency Atiku Abubakar will continue to engage Nigerians directly on how to make their lives affordable again. He does not need to engage personally with a President who attacks his ideas while refusing to call his name.

But whenever you misrepresent Atiku’s proposals, Bola, I will answer the record. You chose not to name Atiku. That is your prerogative. Atiku chose to stand with the people. That is a commitment. And that, Bola, is precisely why you cannot stop responding to him.

Phrank Shaibu

Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication to Atiku Abubakar, Vice President of Nigeria, 1999–2007, and Presidential Candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC).

1st September,2026.