A foundation member of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Mr Osita Okechukwu, has said the former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar’s desperation to win the 2027 presidential election has pushed his recent ‘retain fuel subsidy’ stance.

Okechukwu, a former Director-General of Voice of Nigeria (VON), in a statement on Sunday in Enugu, described the promise as “medicine after death”, born out of desperation to win the forthcoming presidential election.

He noted that no patriot would doubt that bad economic policies harm liberal democracy and that removal of fuel subsidy, like virtually every other component of Nigeria’s four-decade-old neo-liberal economic experiment, had unintended and painful consequences for Nigerians.

According to Okechukwu, among the consequences were erosion of living standards, severe pressure on small and medium-scale enterprises, rising unemployment, slide of more than 100 million Nigerians into multidimensional poverty, and worsening insecurity crisis, especially kidnapping.

“One is at a loss how His Excellency Atiku Abubakar, who was not only on the same page with President Bola Tinubu in 2022 that removal of fuel subsidy was inevitable, but was also a kingpin in the first phase implementation of the Fourth Republic’s neo-liberal economic policies, can now present himself as the champion of fuel subsidy retention?

“Among those policies which he superintended were fuel subsidy removal and the privatisation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), some of which have produced outcomes that impacted adversely on Nigerians and had retarded our economic growth,” he said.

He wondered what had changed between the time Atiku proposed the removal of fuel subsidy and this time he promised to retain it.

“is this not sheer opportunism and simply an electoral promise designed to exploit the hardship Nigerians are experiencing today?”

Okechukwu described Atiku’s latest stance as “the height of political desperation and inconsistency.”