By Anjorin Oludolapo Charles

The APC should listen carefully, because this debate may become larger than petrol. A government can survive an unpopular policy, even an unpopular president. What becomes dangerous is when citizens begin to believe their sacrifice produced nothing. There is an old African wisdom that the person carrying a heavy load does not complain because the load is heavy; he complains when he discovers the destination was never worth the journey.

Nigeria has carried this burden for three years, and by 2027, Nigerians will ask a simple question: where did the journey take us? If the answer is more debt, higher living costs and missed opportunities, no amount of political sophistication will make that question disappear.

It is against this backdrop that Atiku Abubakar’s latest intervention on fuel subsidy deserves serious attention. If elected president in 2027, the African Democratic Congress presidential candidate says his administration would restore subsidy under a different model, one that moves intervention away from imported petrol and towards domestic refining. Qualifying local refineries would receive crude at preferential prices, producing petroleum more cheaply for Nigerian consumers while strengthening domestic refining capacity. That distinction is not cosmetic.

For years, Nigeria subsidised consumption while letting the productive side of the petroleum value chain wither, importing what we could have refined and rewarding import dependence over production. Atiku’s model attempts to reverse that incentive: keep the crude in Nigeria, let Nigerian refineries process it, and let more of the value chain stay within the domestic economy.

That proposition becomes more significant against the transformation underway in Nigeria’s refining landscape. The Dangote Refinery has changed the scale of domestic refining, and several modular and private refineries are coming on stream; Nigeria could approach a refining capacity of around one million barrels per day by the second quarter of 2027.

Yet capacity alone is not enough. A refinery without adequate crude is little more than an expensive monument to bad policy, which is why the Petroleum Industry Act’s Section 109, the Domestic Crude Supply Obligation, matters: it is meant to ensure crude produced in Nigeria is available for domestic refining.

The challenge is no longer whether Nigeria can refine, but whether it will deliberately create the conditions for refineries to operate consistently and competitively.

Nigerians do not have to imagine what happens when that condition is missing; they are living through it. Since early August 2026, Dangote Refinery has cut its ex-depot petrol price more than once, at one point to N1,165 per litre, yet Lagos and Abuja pumps barely moved, still selling between N1,240 and N1,299. The pain of subsidy removal arrived in 2023, immediate and universal. The benefit of domestic refining is arriving in 2026, partial, worth only tens of naira a litre against a pump price that has roughly quadrupled since. Somewhere between refinery gate and pump, the savings are getting lost, unaccounted for. This is why Atiku’s plan deserves scrutiny on its specifics rather than dismissal as “subsidy 2.0”: a hard annual fiscal ceiling through the federal budget, crude tracked from allocation to point of sale, independent audits, sanctions for refiners who withhold savings, and a sunset clause as capacity expands. That is a materially different architecture from simply reopening the import subsidy tap.

The stronger economic concepts here are industrial policy, backward integration, import substitution and economies of scale. If capacity expands, crude is reliably supplied to legitimate refiners, and the cost advantage passes through to consumers, Nigeria can progressively cut its dependence on imported refined products. That alone does not guarantee cheaper petrol, since efficiency, logistics, financing and exchange rates still matter, but it creates a fundamentally different production structure. It is precisely here that the debate turns towards the Tinubu administration.

The government removed the petrol subsidy in 2023, arguing the system was fiscally unsustainable.

Nigerians accepted the pain: transport costs rose, food became more expensive, disposable incomes shrank. But what did Nigerians receive in return? The predictable APC defence is that the money did not disappear, pointing to increased FAAC allocations and arguing Nigerians should hold their governors accountable. On closer examination, this does not answer the central question. FAAC distributes revenue; it is not an economic development strategy. More money entering government coffers does not, by itself, tell Nigerians what productive capacity was created.

That question no longer has to be rhetorical. According to the Federal Ministry of Finance’s own reform scorecard, the Federal Government received N20.4 trillion in incremental resources between June 2023 and December 2025, from subsidy savings, other revenue and fresh borrowing. Of that, only N424 billion, 2.1 per cent, went to social welfare, and education’s share was N223 billion, just 1.1 percent.

By contrast, N9.39 trillion went to wages and allowances and N9.37 trillion to servicing external debt, together over 90 per cent of the entire windfall. Borrowing, not subsidy savings, supplied the largest single share, roughly 58 per cent. Sit with that: the government removed a subsidy Nigerians felt within days, and three years later its own numbers show that for every naira of fiscal space the reform created, roughly one kobo went to education while the overwhelming majority went to salaries and debt already owed. This is not a governor’s problem. It is the Federal Government’s own scorecard describing what Abuja did with Abuja’s own money.

Certainly, governors must be held accountable for the resources they control. But Abuja remains responsible for the national economic architecture, the broader environment in which investment either flourishes or collapses. FAAC can distribute money; it cannot manufacture development. A government that removes a major subsidy should show what the reform produced beyond the size of government accounts: roads built, power generated, jobs sustained. Otherwise the argument becomes circular: subsidy removed for fiscal necessity, more resources received, Nigerians told to keep waiting. At what point does a perpetually deferred benefit become the problem itself?

This becomes even more uncomfortable when borrowing enters the conversation. Nigeria did not merely remove the subsidy; it has continued borrowing heavily, and this deserves harder interrogation. Nigeria is projected to spend 11.6 billion dollars on debt servicing in 2026, more than double the 5.21 billion spent in 2025. The IMF projects Nigeria will spend over half of government revenue on debt service this year, and Tinubu himself has said nearly half of 2026’s projected revenue goes toward debt. Whatever fiscal room subsidy removal was meant to create is being consumed, at an accelerating rate, by debt already owed.

To be fair, not every number points one way. Nigeria’s petrol import bill fell by roughly N87.4 billion in Q1 2026 as domestic refining scaled up, and debt as a share of GDP has been reported near 32 per cent, an improvement. These are real achievements. But a shrinking debt-to-GDP ratio beside debt servicing that consumes half of government revenue is less a contradiction than a warning: a country can look healthier on one ratio while its room to invest in its people keeps shrinking. Macro improvement and household relief are not the same thing.

Charles is a political strategist and a political commentator.