Understanding Atikunomics, By Sanya Oni

Thanks to my good friend and brother, Phrank Shaibu, former vice president Atiku Abubakar’s senior special assistant on public communication, the fuel subsidy debate not only rages on, it seems destined to become the hot button topic as the electoral season revs up. Unfortunately, if he, like his other colleague, Paul Ibe, had sought to provide clarifications to their principal’s volte face on the subsidy question, both the agent(s) and the principal on whose behalf they claim to speak have certainly done enough muddling to confuse their followers on what exactly the issues are.

 “If elected, I will bring back the oil subsidy, and whoever stole the money must refund it.”

That was the simple, declarative statement by Atiku that leaves no questions as to what it meant. Although he chose to speak in Hausa which suggests that the message was probably meant for a targeted audience most of whom may have been programmed to hear only which they had sought to hear, the ensuing backlash in the wake of the careless repudiation of all that the speaker claimed to have stood for in his public life should not be lost on anyone. The responses would seem far more than he could have bargained for hence the unending cycle of clarifications from his media handlers.

Well, Atiku’s media adviser Paul Ibe, says his principal should not be attacked simply because he is willing to reconsider a policy position he held in 2023. “Leadership and heartlessness should never go together. A responsible leader must be prepared to rethink, restructure or even reverse a policy when its implementation is inflicting severe hardship on the people he seeks to govern”.

 “The more important question is whether the policy has improved the lives of ordinary Nigerians and whether the savings have been translated into transportation, healthcare, education, jobs and meaningful social protection”.  That was Ibe in a post on his X (Twitter) account last Friday.

The problem here is not just the vacuous rationalisation. It is about the character of their principal, who, has on more than one occasion, pandered, opportunistically to the mob, rather than show leadership when it truly matters.  In this, most Nigerians only needed to recall his infamous tweet (which he would later delete when some zealots pounced on him) in the wake of the gruesome murder of Deborah Samuel Yakubu of the Shehu Shagari College of Education in Sokoto to understand the Atiku School of leadership by convenience.

Now that the issue of character has come into play, it certainly begs the question of whether the former number two citizen still holds the same views that he held in those heady days of privatisation when government’s choice assets, sold at giveaway prices, were parcelled out to be cannibalised by mercantilist scrapyard investors. In other words, which other issue of public policy, aside the fuel subsidy question, has his views changed if only to enable Nigerians have a better appreciation of his Pauline ‘conversion’? Nigerians ought to be interested in finding out.

Nigerians will do well to pay close attention to what the ADC candidate claims to be on offer. Never mind its many contradictions; he claims he is not seeking to bring back the open-ended and corrupt-prone subsidy of the past. His proposed plan, he says will be “strictly budgeted, monitored, and tied to domestic refining and production rather than wide-open importation”!

Yes, the proposal, he says would involve supplying qualifying Nigerian refineries with crude at preferential prices under strict conditions, with the aim of lowering petrol costs and encouraging domestic refining.Related News

In other words, the local refineries will be offered subsidised crude apparently in return for refined fuel and this on such terms that would suit the pocket of every fuel consumer! Welcome to Atiku’s Eldorado!

I presume that the favoured refiners would be bound by oath to whatever gods they subscribe to ensure that they fulfil their terms of their bargains, which may include an oath of fidelity to the government officials in charge. If it comes with the territory that those refineries, with say 50,000 barrels capacity, could somehow get some extra 10,000 to be sold at the open market at premium, so be it!

As for our ECOWAS neighbours whose economies have suffered dislocation in the aftermath of the subsidy removal, it will again be boom time with our ever busy customs providing smugglers guard duties in the spirit of African brotherhood!  

Welcome to the brand new world of Atikunomics; economic populism could not have been better adorned, excepting that it is only in the same old, borrowed robes! And this is supposed to subsist perhaps until the Nigerian economy improves after which it would be terminated!

By the way, what is new here? Is it the crude swaps – the practice of exchanging our raw crude with refined products – that has not been tested? The futures market under which future production is exchanged for cash upfront at a discount? And where will the “budgeted” fund to execute the subsidy fantasy come from? Will it be tied to the same oil receipts already falling miserably short of covering the nation’s revenue gaps at a time of massive infrastructure gaps?

And now the other bizarre argument, which underlies the Atiku plan’s inability to understand the fine distinction between tax credits and fiscal concessions to oil producers and the wasteful subsidy. Here is how Atiku puts it: “When major oil investors knock on Tinubu’s door, the sermon changes. Suddenly, government intervention is good economics; tax credits are necessary; fiscal concessions are strategic; and private investment must be ‘de-risked.’ Apparently, subsidy is only evil when poor Nigerians benefit from it”!

Baffling isn’t it! That is vintage Atiku.

Is it a case of the former vice president not understanding the difference between incentives designed to encourage further investments in a sector that lays the proverbial golden egg, and the whopping outlay deployed to keep fuel prices at below cost price otherwise misnamed as subsidy? These are interesting, but nonetheless desperate, times indeed.  Aside the bizarre economics, Nigerians had better prepare for similar treatises from the Atiku School of leadership where power and its obsession has become the single defining factor.