APC Told Atiku "Bring Your Homework" After He Promised to Bring Back Fuel Subsidy in Some New Costume

So Atiku stood in front of cameras in Abuja on Friday and said, essentially, "don't worry, I have a plan", a "production subsidy" for locally refined petrol, which he says will bring pump prices down. He also asked Tinubu to reduce fuel and electricity costs while he was at it, presumably just to complete the full campaign-speech bingo card.

APC's response, through Dele Alake, wasn't "here's a better idea." It was closer to a lecturer handing back an assignment with red ink everywhere: explain your subsidy rate, explain your spending ceiling, explain your funding source, explain how you'll stop the smuggling and diversion that happened last time, and explain how any of this fits inside the Petroleum Industry Act, the same law that says the market, not the government, sets fuel prices. The one they wrote.

Then, almost as a formality, they pulled the real evidence: back in November 2022, at Lagos Business School, Atiku called the subsidy system "fraudulent" and promised to kill it completely. Fast forward to August 25 this year, and there's a tweet from the man himself saying, word for word, "I will restore it!" APC just sat both quotes side by side and let them argue with each other.

And then there's the number: APC says this whole plan could cost somewhere between ₦17 trillion and ₦21 trillion a year. That's not a policy estimate anymore, that's a lottery jackpot. Nobody's bank alert has ever been formatted to display that many digits.

Here's the part that never changes though: the people actually queueing at filling stations aren't getting a costed plan from either side, just two men trading homework assignments while the price at the pump does whatever it wants regardless of who's "right" on paper.