APC Berates Atiku Over Fuel Subsidy Removal Reversal Promise

All Progressives Congress (APC) has berated former vice president and presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Atiku Abubakar, over his pledge to restore Nigeria’s petrol subsidy if elected president in the 2027 general election.

Atiku, during a Facebook Live session, said he did not initially oppose the policy but had since changed his position, questioning how the savings from the subsidy removal had been utilised.

“I initially did not oppose the removal of the fuel subsidy. But now that it has been removed, where is the money? Where has the subsidy money gone? Has it been used to improve healthcare, education or security?

“If I win the presidential election, I will restore the subsidy. And anyone who stole Nigeria’s subsidy funds must return the money,” he said.

But in his reaction, the APC national publicity secretary, Felix Morka, described the declaration by the ADC presidential flag-bearer as desperation taken too far.

Morka, in a post on X, said it was unfortunate that former Vice-President Atiku had backflipped from his 2023 policy support for fuel subsidy removal to a promise to restore the fuel subsidy if elected president in 2027.

“This is desperation of the most pitiful kind … an admission he is clueless and out of touch with Nigeria’s economic realities and imperatives of reform … wilful blindness to transformative progress recorded by the Tinubu administration … grossly bereft of ideas of alternative economic policy prescription … a last-ditch grasping at straws of misplaced populism that sets up to what may well become the final defeat, in 2027, of the longest presidential ambition in Nigeria’s electoral history,” Morka stated.

President Tinubu had announced the removal of the petrol subsidy in his inaugural address on May 29, 2023, at Eagle Square, Abuja, where he declared: “Subsidy is gone.”