Atiku’s subsidy reintroduction scheme, myopic, stillborn – TDF

 

The Democratic Front (TDF) has described plans by the Presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC) Atiku Abubakar to reintroduce fuel subsidy as myopic.

In a statement signed by its Chairman Danjuma Muhammad and Secretary Wale Adedayo, the group said the proposal was simply meant to con gullible Nigerians.

The statement read in part: “We consider Atiku’s outburst against President Bola Ahmed Tinubu over his flawed and convoluted plan to restore petroleum subsidy, as immature, irresponsible and anti-democratic.

“It is sad, humiliating, and a delusion of grandeur on the part of the former Vice President to assume that his opaque and impracticable proposal of reintroducing petroleum subsidy will earn him the peoples’ mandate to the presidency. This is probably why he boasted that 100 million Tinubus cannot stop him from implementing his pipe dream fantasy.

“In scrutinizing Atiku’s model of petroleum subsidy, we find that the former Vice President literarily validated President Tinubu’s decision to scrap the old subsidy regime, by making an emphatic declaration that he was not going to reintroduce the old type of subsidy that reigned in Nigeria between 1973 and 2023.

“Atiku’s refusal to propose the old subsidy regime to Nigerians, is a remarkable self- admittance on his part, that the President was indeed right to have removed that wasteful oil subsidy regime in 2023. This exposes yet another vista of Atiku’s political hypocrisy.

“Being the brainchild of a Vice President who presided over the most scandalous privatization exercise in human history, Atiku’s “follow the barrel” subsidy proposal failed to establish Transparency and Accountability in its plan to sell crude oil at a discounted price to refinery owners.

“This, for us, is an outright confirmation that the proposed intervention mainly seeks to relocate arbitrage and financial leakages, which characterized Nigeria’s old petroleum subsidy regime for a period of 40 years, from consumption to production. Nothing could be further than the truth.”

The group also picked holes in the Atiku plan.

“Furthermore, the Atiku Economic Recovery Plan (AERP) could also not provide cogent explanations on its resistance against market dynamics and economic headwinds, like fluctuating global price of crude oil, fluctuating cost of refining, fluctuating daily production of crude oil, and most disconcerting, the ongoing crude swap that currently stands at about 300, 000 barrels per day. These are some of the unavoidable factors that make Atiku’s oil subsidy proposal dead on arrival (DOA).

“Perhaps, the most disastrous and self-sabotaging aspect of Atiku’s “follow the barrel” proposal, is its potency to shrink Nigeria’s foreign exchange earning capacity, to the catastrophic detriment of our gross national revenue.

“The frequency of fluctuation in crude oil transactions, which often makes Nigeria’s annual budgetary projections difficult to attain, will make Atiku’s proposed strict capping and tracking policy unrealistic, thereby resulting in huge losses of unaccountable foreign exchange for the country.

“This scenario would impoverish the federation account, starve FAAC of distributable funds, and deprive sub-nationals the ability to adequately respond to capital, recurrent, and security expenditures.

“Atiku’s myopic subsidy reintroduction can only resonate with the illiterate and the uninformed. It is a populist-stunt that lacks clarity, conviction, sustainability and coherence.

“Nigeria cannot afford to experiment with such hollow knee-jerk economic intervention hurriedly put together to score cheap political advantage ahead of the 2027 general elections,” it added.