Atiku Abubakar and his running mate, Rotimi Amaechi, took the African Democratic Congress (ADC) campaign’s cost-of-living message to a filling station in Abuja on Saturday.
The stop was designed to turn an economic argument into a public encounter: fuel is not an abstract line in a budget; it is the price of getting to work, moving food and keeping a small business alive.
Reports said the pair spoke with Nigerians at the station while repeating their pledge to make petrol cheaper through a production-based subsidy.
The ADC’s central distinction is important. Atiku says he is not proposing a return to the old arrangement that subsidised imported petrol.
His stated model would support crude refined inside Nigeria, lower the feedstock cost for qualifying domestic refineries and pass part of that saving to consumers.
In Atiku’s own explanation, the support would be capped, independently verified and tied to crude refined locally, with electronic tracking, domestic-supply obligations, audits and penalties for diversion.
Amaechi has supplied the sharper political language. Appearing on Politics Today, he said an Atiku administration would introduce a production subsidy even if that required amending the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA).
He argued that the proposal would end
dependence on imported fuel, support domestic jobs and reduce the cost of petrol, food and transport within the first year. He has also insisted that proposed intervention would be legal and different from the former consumer- subsidy regime.
That distinction gives the ADC an opening. Nigerians are living with the immediate consequences of higher energy and transport costs, while the benefits of reform are still being argued at the level of macroeconomic indicators.
A promise to make fuel cheaper by
supporting Nigerian production is politically more defensible than a promise to reopen an opaque import-subsidy system.
It speaks to both household relief and industrial policy. But the distinction does not, by itself, solve the problem. A subsidy is still a subsidy if public money or public crude is used to reduce the price.
The decisive questions are how much it
will cost, who will qualify, how the discount will be calculated, how much of it will reach the pump and what happens when global crude prices, exchange rates or refinery margins change.
The State House has pressed precisely these points, asking what revenue would
fund the programme, whether govt would borrow, how it would be reconciled with
existing petroleum-sector rules and how abuse would be prevented.
The fiscal warning is not a trivial campaign objection. The Centre for the Promotion of Private Enterprise estimated that restoring a broad petrol subsidy could expose the government to about ₦52.5 billion daily, ₦1.575 trillion monthly or nearly ₦20 trillion annually.
It warned that such a bill could crowd out infrastructure, healthcare, education,
security and social protection, while encouraging cross-border diversion.
Those figures describe a universal subsidy and therefore may not map directly onto ADC’s narrower production model. The campaign must nevertheless publish its own ceiling and assumptions instead of leaving voters to infer that a targeted subsidy will be inexpensive.
There is also a credibility problem. Atiku’s proposal is being presented as a correction to the hardship caused by subsidy removal, while the governing camp presents it as a retreat.to a costly and corruption-prone past.
The Presidency has acknowledged Atiku’s right to offer an alternative, but says political promises must be backed by fiscal arithmetic. That is a fair test. The ADC cannot ask Nigerians to trust a new mechanism merely because it has
given the old mechanism a new name.
The Abuja filling-station visit was therefore useful politics, but incomplete policy. It showed an opposition ticket willing to meet citizens at the point where economic pain is paid for.
It also exposed the danger of governing through a slogan. “Production subsidy” can mean a disciplined, capped discount for locally refined crude; it can also become a fresh channel for rent-seeking if the eligibility rules, pricing formula and audit trail are weak.
The political tightrope is now visible. Atiku and Amaechi must promise relief without reviving waste, defend local refining without protecting inefficiency, and challenge Tinubu without pretending that every price reduction is free.
The government, for its part, cannot
dismiss the proposal as nostalgia while failing to explain when households should expect meaningful relief from its own reforms.
The ADC should publish draft framework before the campaign asks Nigerians for applause: the annual fiscal ceiling, the source of funds, the qualifying refineries, the crudepricing formula.
Also, the expected pump-price effect, the consumer-protection mechanism and the independent body that will audit the scheme. Until then, the filling-station visit is a compelling picture of hardship, not yet proof of a workable cure.
