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 N20.4tn in incremental resources between June 2023 and December 2025, from subsidy savings, other revenue and fresh borrowing. Of that, only N424bn, 2.1 per cent, went to social welfare, and education’s share was N223bn, just 1.1 per cent. By contrast, N9.39tn went to wages and allowances and N9.37tn 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 $11.6bn on debt servicing in 2026, more than double the $5.21bn 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 alongside 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.

Debt itself is not the problem; what a government does with borrowed money is. Nigeria borrowed to finance the Kainji Dam project in the 1960s not merely to finance consumption but to expand electricity generation and build an economic base for future income. That is the logic of productive borrowing: borrow, build, increase productivity, expand the tax base, and generate the resources to service the debt. A country can borrow itself into prosperity if it borrows to build the future, or into poverty if it borrows merely to finance the present. The central question should not be “why are you borrowing,” but “what are Nigerians getting for it?” Had government transformed the fiscal opportunity of subsidy reform into productive investment, the argument for sacrifice would have had a tangible foundation. Instead, Nigerians have endured the pain while watching the debt burden grow. This is how nations slide into debt traps, not through one spectacular act of recklessness, but through the cumulative mismanagement of opportunities.

Education sharpens this further. Nigeria removed the PMS subsidy, absorbed a dramatic rise in living costs and kept borrowing, while education stayed inadequately funded, and the N20.4 trillion figure above shows the unaffordability excuse is hard to sustain when the country can mobilise such sums. The real question is not whether Nigeria has resources but whether it has chosen the right priorities. Ahmadu Bello, Obafemi Awolowo and Nnamdi Azikiwe understood that roads, schools and skilled people were not competing priorities but complementary foundations of a productive economy. No refinery can transform an economy permanently without the engineers and skilled workers capable of sustaining the industries around it.

This is also why Atiku’s proposal should not be judged merely on whether it lowers petrol prices. A functioning domestic refining industry can create employment across engineering, logistics, banking and insurance, cut the forex needed for imports, and deepen Nigeria’s manufacturing base, becoming more than a refinery- an economic ecosystem, the way telecoms deregulation did not merely put phones in Nigerian hands but created fintech and millions of new livelihoods around it. Transformative policy is judged not by what it produces immediately but by the ecosystem it makes possible, and that is the thinking Nigeria needs from its next president: not how much revenue a sector generates, but what it can become.

Once accepted, the argument extends beyond crude oil. Nigeria should not export cocoa beans, lithium and agricultural commodities while others capture the value through processing, then import the finished products back at a multiple of the original value. Countries that industrialised successfully deliberately cultivated productive capacity rather than opening their markets and hoping it would appear; Britain’s protection of its own textile industry illustrates the principle, not a model to copy uncritically. Serious industrial policy should encourage value addition, so that what leaves Nigeria increasingly leaves as a finished product. None of this is possible without human capital: Nigeria cannot industrialise while its brightest are pushed abroad by unemployment and limited opportunity, and every skilled professional who leaves represents capacity transferred elsewhere. The economy Nigeria builds must give its people a reason to stay, and to return.

This is why the subsidy debate is ultimately larger than petrol: whether government sees revenue as something to distribute or as capital to build the future, whether Nigeria keeps exporting raw materials and importing finished ones, and whether the sacrifices Nigerians have made since 2023 will produce something worthy of them.

Atiku’s proposition deserves scrutiny, not dismissal. It must be subjected to transparent costing, independent auditing, and safeguards against rent-seeking; any refinery receiving preferential crude must show that the benefit reaches consumers rather than becoming another channel for politically connected interests to capture public resources. But dismissing it as simply “bringing back subsidy” would be intellectually lazy. It is fundamentally different from the old import-dependent model, seeking to intervene in domestic production, use Nigeria’s crude advantage to support local refining, and make petroleum products more affordable at home. The APC should resist the temptation to answer a serious economic proposition with slogans.

Nigerians have already paid for this reform, through transport fares, food prices, shrinking purchasing power and higher costs of doing business. The government may explain the economics of subsidy removal as often as it wishes, but there comes a point when theory meets the kitchen table, and that is where politics becomes unforgiving. By 2027, Nigerians will ask the question governments cannot indefinitely avoid: where did the journey take us? If the answer is stronger domestic refining, better infrastructure, better schools, more jobs and a productive industrial base, Nigerians may conclude the pain produced something. If the answer is more debt, higher living costs and another round of explanations about who else should be held responsible, the political consequences will be difficult to contain.

There is an old saying that when the drumbeat changes, the dancer must change his steps. Nigeria’s drumbeat has changed; the question is whether its leaders have changed their thinking. The country does not merely need a president who can remove subsidies. It needs one who can turn the resources released by difficult reforms into productive assets and economic opportunity. That, ultimately, is the real test of 2027, and it will not be answered by governors behind a podium or the cleverness of political propaganda. It will be answered by the Nigerian who can afford transport again, the young person who finds a job, the entrepreneur who keeps a factory running, and the family that can buy food without sacrificing everything else.

Atiku has put a different proposition on the table. The APC should not be afraid of it. It should be afraid of Nigerians deciding the sacrifice was never worth the destination.

Charles is a political strategist and a political commentator