Former Vice President and African Democratic Congress (ADC) presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, has hit back at President Bola Tinubu, describing the current administration’s reforms as “economic arson followed by propaganda about the ashes.”
This fiery exchange followed criticisms from the Presidency, which dismissed Atiku’s proposed petroleum-sector intervention model as a sign of “serious ignorance.”
Reacting, Atiku described Tinubu’s dismissal as the insolent sermon of a failed economic experimenter who mistakes Nigerians’ capacity to endure suffering for evidence that his policies are working.
He gave the reaction in a statement issued by his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, on Friday.
The ADC Presidential Candidate said there was an almost comical audacity in Tinubu calling anyone economically ignorant after presiding over an economy where government revenues have ballooned while citizens’ purchasing power has collapsed.
Shaibu quoted Atiku as saying: “If economic ignorance had a presidential seal, Tinubu and his family would be its official logo.
“Here is an administration that detonated simultaneous fuel-price, exchange-rate and cost-of-living shocks across a fragile economy, watched millions become poorer, and now struts around Abuja demanding applause for the wreckage.
“That is not reform. It is economic arson followed by propaganda about the ashes.
“Tinubu’s courtiers may clap because Federation Account Allocation Committee FAAC allocations have increased, but hungry Nigerians cannot boil FAAC figures for dinner.
“Businesses cannot power factories with presidential speeches, workers cannot pay transport fares with macroeconomic grammar, and parents cannot settle school fees with statistics manufactured for State House applause.
“A government that grows richer while its citizens grow poorer is not reforming an economy. It is extracting from its people.
“Tinubu should therefore spare Nigerians the economics lecture. A man who set the house on fire cannot ridicule another man for redesigning the fire extinguisher.”
Defending the substance of his proposed model against Tinubu’s dismissal, Atiku said: “Tinubu and his gang of jesters should acquaint themselves with elementary economics before accusing anyone of ignorance.
“Economic prescriptions respond to prevailing conditions. Even a first-year economics student understands ceteris paribus — other things being equal.
“But other things are no longer equal in Tinubu’s Nigeria.
“Apparently fresh from a bowl of amala, Tinubu mounted the podium at Eagle Square and casually declared that ‘subsidy is gone’ without a credible transition plan or adequate protection against the inflationary consequences.
“Those three words were not economic policy. They were economic vandalism by presidential fiat.
“Petrol prices exploded. Transportation and production costs followed. The naira depreciated sharply. Food prices soared. Businesses buckled and household purchasing power was decimated.
“Having destroyed the economic assumptions upon which previous prescriptions rested, Tinubu’s propagandists now accuse Atiku of inconsistency for responding to the disaster they created.
“That is not inconsistency. That is economics. Only incompetence insists on yesterday’s prescription after today’s conditions have changed.”
Atiku clarified that his proposal was not a call for the return of the old subsidy arrangement, but a targeted, capped, budgeted, time-bound and independently audited production-support mechanism tied to domestic production and protected against arbitrage.
“The difference is simple: Tinubu pronounced first and searched for a plan afterwards. Atiku studied the consequences and produced a solution”, the statement noted.
He also queried the President’s claim that subsidy removal had benefited states through improved FAAC allocations, saying: “Now that Tinubu tells Nigerians that one of the great achievements of subsidy removal is that states which previously struggled to pay salaries now receive larger FAAC allocations, he must realise that this argument is economically shallow and, worse still, an admission of developmental failure.
“You do not build a federation by impoverishing citizens so that Abuja can send bigger cheques to governors. That is robbing households to subsidise governments.
“If the price Nigerians must pay for governors to meet their basic obligations is crushing transport costs, diminished purchasing power, food inflation and deepening poverty, then Tinubu has merely transferred solvency from the kitchen tables of ordinary families to government treasuries.
“Worse still, this FAAC bonanza creates the wrong incentives. States should develop competitive economies, attract investment, exploit their comparative advantages, broaden their productive tax bases and create wealth.
“Instead, Tinubu is deepening an Abuja dependency economy where governors can wait every month for increasingly fat allocations from the centre.
“Why undertake difficult reforms, industrialise or expand productive capacity when Abuja provides an ever-growing monthly cheque? That is not fiscal federalism. It is fiscal sedation and rascality.
“There is no economic morality in making a market woman poorer so that a governor can receive a bigger allocation.
“There is no developmental wisdom in emptying household pockets merely to fatten government accounts while Nigerians still confront bad roads, inadequate hospitals, failing schools and unemployment.
