As the 2027 political season gathers pace, fuel subsidy removal has resurfaced as a live political fault line. Atiku Abubakar has proposed a “targeted” subsidy framework to cushion citizens from the continuing cost-of-living crisis. President Tinubu, meanwhile, continues to defend the 2023 decision, arguing that it expanded resources available to the federating units, helped states meet salary obligations, funded NELFUND and social programmes, and enabled major infrastructure projects. Both miss the more important question: not whether subsidy removal was right, but whether the fiscal space it created is being converted into the assets, especially transportation, that would actually lower the cost of living of Nigerians. A subsidy regime consuming trillions of naira annually, and encouraging arbitrage and smuggling in the process, was fiscally unsustainable , which was a case I made at length in an earlier op-ed, “Can Nigeria’s 2023 Reforms Still Be Turned into a Development Dividend?”
2027 and Nigeria’s subsidy debate: The reform was right. The financing story still needs a plan, By David Okelue Ugwunta
