By Muhammad Baqeer Isa
Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has accused President Bola Tinubu of presiding over “economic arson” and handing Nigerians the bill for a subsidy regime he claimed to have removed.
In a press statement issued on Friday, August 21, 2026, by his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, Atiku said the Tinubu administration detonated simultaneous shocks in fuel price, exchange rate and cost of living without a credible transition plan.
“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,” the statement said.
“That is not reform. It is economic arson followed by propaganda about the ashes.”
Atiku was responding to Tinubu’s recent criticism of his proposed petroleum-sector intervention. He described Tinubu’s attack as “the insolent sermon of a failed economic experimenter who mistakes Nigerians’ capacity to endure suffering for evidence that his policies are working.”
The former Vice President said while government revenues and FAAC allocations to states have increased, citizens’ purchasing power has collapsed.
“Tinubu’s courtiers may clap because FAAC allocations have increased, but hungry Nigerians cannot boil FAAC figures for dinner,” he said.
Atiku further alleged that despite the President’s declaration that “subsidy is gone,” the NNPC’s audited accounts still show about ₦17.5 trillion in energy-security costs and petroleum under-recoveries, including ₦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?” he asked.
He stated that he is not proposing a return to the “corrupt, open-ended subsidy bazaar” but a “targeted, capped, budgeted, time-bound and independently audited production-support mechanism tied to domestic production.”
Atiku also faulted the rise in FAAC allocations to states, saying it promotes dependency on Abuja rather than fiscal federalism.
“You do not build a federation by impoverishing citizens so that Abuja can send bigger cheques to governors. That is robbing households to subsidise governments,” he said.
The former presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress, ADC, further called on the Presidency to explain about ₦30 trillion in Federation Account revenues and the ₦12.8 trillion Service-Wide Vote in the 2026 budget.
“Nigerians have paid enough for Tinubunomics. They should not be sentenced to another four years of the bitter experiment,” the statement concluded.
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