On Thursday, while hosting Osun State Governor Ademola Adeleke at the State House, President Tinubu had described Atiku, the presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress, as ignorant about governance and the economy.
“I saw one of my opponents now say he will go back to subsidy. I read it. That is a demonstration of serious ignorance on governance and the economy,” Tinubu said.
However, following the President’s sarcastic dismissal of his proposal to restore fuel subsidy if elected in 2027, former Vice President and presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Atiku Abubakar, has slammed President Bola Tinubu’s “economic ignorance”.
But in a swift riposte, Atiku described the President’s remarks as “the insolent sermon of a failed economic experimenter” who, he said, mistook Nigerians’ capacity to endure hardship for evidence that his policies were working.
In a statement issued by his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, Atiku said Tinubu lacked the moral standing to accuse anyone of economic ignorance.
Shaibu said, “If economic ignorance had a presidential seal, Tinubu and his family would be its official logo. Here is an administration that detonated simultaneous fuel-price, exchange-rate and cost-of-living shocks across a fragile economy, watched millions become poorer, and now struts around Abuja demanding applause for the wreckage.
“That is not reform. It is economic arson followed by propaganda about the ashes. Tinubu’s courtiers may clap because FAAC allocations have increased, but hungry Nigerians cannot boil FAAC figures for dinner. Businesses cannot power factories with presidential speeches, workers cannot pay transport fares with macroeconomic grammar, and parents cannot settle school fees with statistics manufactured for State House applause.
“A government that grows richer while its citizens grow poorer is not reforming an economy. It is extracting from its people.
“Tinubu should therefore spare Nigerians the economics lecture. A man who set the house on fire cannot ridicule another man for redesigning the fire extinguisher.
“Tinubu and his gang of jesters should acquaint themselves with elementary economics before accusing anyone of ignorance. Economic prescriptions respond to prevailing conditions. Even a first-year economics student understands ceteris paribus — other things being equal.
“But other things are no longer equal in Tinubu’s Nigeria. Apparently fresh from a bowl of amala, Tinubu mounted the podium at Eagle Square and casually declared that ‘subsidy is gone’ without a credible transition plan or adequate protection against the inflationary consequences.
“Those three words were not economic policy. They were economic vandalism by presidential fiat. Petrol prices exploded. Transportation and production costs followed. The naira depreciated sharply. Food prices soared. Businesses buckled and household purchasing power was decimated.
“Having destroyed the economic assumptions upon which previous prescriptions rested, Tinubu’s propagandists now accuse Atiku of inconsistency for responding to the disaster they created.
“That is not inconsistency. That is economics. Only incompetence insists on yesterday’s prescription after today’s conditions have changed.
“Atiku is not proposing the resurrection of the corrupt, open-ended subsidy bazaar. He proposes a targeted, capped, budgeted, time-bound and independently audited production-support mechanism tied to domestic production and protected against arbitrage.
“The difference is simple: Tinubu pronounced first and searched for a plan afterwards. Atiku studied the consequences and produced a solution.
“But there is an even greater hypocrisy in Tinubu’s subsidy sermon.
“Tinubu told Nigerians subsidy was dead. Yet NNPC’s audited accounts reportedly contain approximately ₦17.5 trillion in energy-security costs and petroleum under-recoveries, including about ₦7.13 trillion classified as Energy Security and ₦8.67 trillion in under-recoveries.
“So what exactly did Tinubu remove?
“If subsidy is dead, why are under-recoveries alive? If corruption was eliminated, why has opacity survived? Tinubu has given Nigerians the worst of both worlds: he removed the relief but retained the opaque costs. Nigerians got the pain; government kept the bill.”
Atiku also criticized Tinubu’s argument that subsidy removal had enabled states that previously struggled to pay salaries to receive larger allocations from the Federation Account.
“You do not build a federation by impoverishing citizens so that Abuja can send bigger cheques to governors. That is robbing households to subsidize governments.
“If the price Nigerians must pay for governors to meet their basic obligations is crushing transport costs, diminished purchasing power, food inflation and deepening poverty, then Tinubu has merely transferred solvency from the kitchen tables of ordinary families to government treasuries,” he said.
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