Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has fired back at President Bola Tinubu, saying that he shouldn’t build a federation by impoverishing Nigerians.
He described the attack on his proposed petroleum-sector intervention as the insolent sermon of a failed economic experimenter who mistakes Nigerians’ capacity to endure suffering for evidence that his policies are working.
In a statement on Friday, issued by his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, Atiku said there was an almost comical audacity in Tinubu calling anyone economically ignorant after presiding over an economy where government revenues have ballooned while citizens’ purchasing power has collapsed.
He 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’s not reform. It’s 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’s 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.”
“Now that Tinubu tells Nigerians that one of the great achievements of subsidy removal is that states which previously struggled to pay salaries now receive larger FAAC allocations, he must realise that this argument is economically shallow and, worse still, an admission of developmental failure. You don’t build a federation by impoverishing citizens so that Abuja can send bigger cheques to governors. That’s robbing households to subsidise governments.”
Atiku added: “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 an act of 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’s not an inconsistency. That’s economics. Only incompetence insists on yesterday’s prescription after today’s conditions have changed.
“Atiku isn’t 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 afterward. Atiku studied the consequences and produced a solution.
“But there’s 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; the government kept the bill.”
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