The Presidency has described former Vice President Atiku Abubakar’s recent criticism of the Federal Government’s petrol price modulation framework and NNPC Retail’s 30-day discount as shallow and politically motivated.
In a statement issued by the State House on Sunday, the Presidency said Atiku’s press conference in Abuja where he attacked the policy was a “seminal example of shallow, election-laced demagoguery” by a politician detached from global realities.
The Presidency argued that governments across the world are adopting various measures to cushion citizens from volatility in the international oil market, citing examples in the United Kingdom where Prime Minister Andy Burnham directed citizens to fuel price comparison tools, and in the United States where President Donald Trump signed an executive order on diesel tax relief.
According to the statement, President Bola Tinubu’s administration has chosen a similar path of providing relief while maintaining fiscal discipline, unlike what it described as Atiku’s attempt to exploit transitional discomfort for political gain.
The State House faulted Atiku’s proposal for a blanket production subsidy, describing it as a “dangerous mathematical fantasy wrapped in political deceit” and not a viable alternative economic model.
It explained that although Nigeria produces about 1.8 million barrels of crude oil per day for over 200 million people, the volume of unencumbered equity crude available to the Federal Government is less than 700,000 barrels per day after accounting for Joint Ventures, Production Sharing Contracts, royalties and production costs.
The Presidency said this reality was clarified by the Coordinating Minister of the Economy and Minister of Finance, Taiwo Oyedele, noting that mega-refineries such as Dangote Refinery require feedstock beyond what government can freely provide without breaching international supply contracts or hurting national revenue.
It added that domestic refiners must therefore supplement local supply with imported crude, and insisted that President Tinubu’s calibrated, multi-layered economic stabilisation strategy, implemented over the last three years, is systematically dismantling long-standing structural distortions.
