The Presidency has described former Vice President Atiku Abubakar’s proposal to restore petrol subsidy as retrogressive and a desperate attempt to regain political power, arguing that the policy would return Nigeria to a wasteful and fiscally burdensome petroleum regime.
The Special Adviser to the President on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, stated this in a statement titled: “Restoring Petrol Subsidies: Atiku’s Volte-Face and Desperation for Power,” issued on Thursday, August 20, 2026.
According to Onanuga, Atiku has finally revealed his economic plans to Nigerians should he be elected President by January next year, but instead of presenting a more creative alternative to the economic programme being implemented by the administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, he proposed the restoration of what the Presidency described as the “much-abused, wasteful, pillaged, corruption-ridden fuel subsidy regime.”
The Presidency noted that the Petroleum Industry Act had made the subsidy regime illegal from the end of June 2023, adding that Atiku had previously supported the elimination of the subsidy in the run-up to the 2023 presidential election.
“Even though he used to believe that the subsidy regime must be eliminated,” Onanuga said, Atiku had now “opportunistically recanted the major plank of his economic doctrine.”
The Presidency said it was not difficult to explain why Atiku had embraced the abandoned subsidy regime five months before the election, arguing that he needed to make a promise that, if candidly presented to Nigerians, would not make fiscal sense and would be against the country’s interests.
However, Onanuga said the Presidency respected Atiku’s constitutional right to propose alternative policies, seek the support of Nigerians and change his position on a major policy prescription.
He added that Nigerians were equally entitled to understand what restoring the subsidy would mean, how it would be funded and whether it was compatible with the legal and structural changes that had taken place in the petroleum sector.
Onanuga also sought to clarify what he described as ambiguities surrounding the word “subsidy.”
According to him, subsidy was not money sitting in government coffers waiting to be distributed to make petrol cheaper. Rather, he explained, it involved NNPC selling fuel to the Nigerian government at a price below its cost, resulting in under-recovery and substantial losses.
He said trillions of naira in subsidy costs were still reflected in NNPC’s books as obligations that the Nigerian government had not paid.
The Presidency also rejected Atiku’s claim of a N30 trillion subsidy windfall or savings, saying no such amount existed.
“Contrary to Atiku’s claim in his interview, no N30 trillion subsidy windfall or savings exists anywhere except in his imagination,” Onanuga stated.
The statement said the petrol subsidy regime Nigerians knew before May 2023 had been dismantled as part of reforms in the petroleum sector.
It explained that the Petroleum Industry Act established a new framework for the downstream petroleum market and removed the subsidy, as had previously happened with diesel, kerosene and aviation fuel.
According to the Presidency, the PIA scheduled the removal of petrol subsidy by the end of June 2023, but President Tinubu accelerated the process by several weeks to stop further financial losses before the statutory deadline.
It argued that restoring the old arrangement could therefore not simply be achieved by announcing that government would once again pay part of the cost of petrol.
Such a policy, it said, would require a clear legal, fiscal and administrative framework, including identifying the source of funds and determining how the programme would operate within the current petroleum-market structure.
The Presidency further argued that Nigeria’s petroleum landscape had changed significantly since May 2023.
For many years, Nigeria relied heavily on imported petrol, with government absorbing the difference between the regulated pump price and the cost of supplying the product.
