President Bola Tinubu's aide, Dada Olusegun, has slammed former Vice President and African Democratic Congress presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar for promising to restore the petrol subsidy if he wins the 2027 presidency.

According to Olusegun, on the surface, it sounds like Atiku cares about the hardship of Nigerians, but his track record speaks differently;

He said for nearly a decade, Atiku positioned himself as a champion of free-market economics, repeatedly calling for the total eradication of the fuel subsidy regime.

"When former President Goodluck Jonathan bravely announced the total deregulation of the downstream petroleum sector on January 1, 2012, sparking the massive "Occupy Nigeria" protests, where did Atiku stand? Atiku firmly aligned with the pro-removal stance, declaring that the fuel subsidy was unsustainable. He explicitly argued that the continuous funding of the subsidy was draining national resources that should otherwise go toward infrastructure and health.

"Next to when news broke of $1.05 billion being diverted from the NLNG dividend funds to fund petrol under-recovery in 2018, the Atiku Presidential Campaign Organisation didn't mince words. They issued a scathing press release declaring the subsidy regime is inefficient and shrouded in secrecy; they committed explicitly to the elimination of this process. Atiku told Nigerians that the entire system bypassed the National Assembly and lacked any shred of accountability.

"Recall when the last administration announced plans to withdraw from price-fixing, Atiku literally celebrated it on his verified X account. He wrote: "Federal government finally withdraws from the fuel subsidy and price-fixing bazaar that had been rife with corruption and stalling investments. And in the same write-up, he explicitly boasted, saying: "This is something patriots have been calling for and for which I was demonised". Alhaji Atiku called the stoppage a right move that should have even come earlier.

"Now, during his campaign run for the 2023 elections, the then-presidential candidate of the People's Democratic Party, PDP, doubled down and openly declared that removing the petrol subsidy was inevitable for economic survival.

"Fast forward to today. With an election on the horizon, he's suddenly singing a completely different tune, claiming he wants to bring the subsidy back," Olusegun said.

He said that Nigeria cannot be governed by policies that change based on whichever way the political wind blows. He said if a politician can spend a decade calling a system a fraudulent scam, celebrate its removal, and then turn around and promise to reinstall it just to get into power, how can we trust anything he says?

"The presidency has rightly slammed this pronouncement, describing it as drenched in hypocrisy and deceit and a desperate attempt to manipulate the public psyche for political gain.

"Alhaji Atiku sounds like he cares about the hardship of Nigerians, but when you lay his current promises side-by-side with his past assertions, the hypocrisy is staggering," he said.

ASA