Fuel Subsidy And Labour/CSOs’s Chance To Turn Atiku’s Gambit Into Issues-Based Election?
BY IDUH ONAH
FORMER Vice President Atiku Abubakar’s recent promise to restore fuel subsidy if elected president in 2027, though still enveloped in fervent public debate, may be a political gift after all.
For organised labour, particularly the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and progressive civil society organisations, the ongoing interesting discursive engagements between major political actors, social and traditional media analysts on Atiku’s promise offer an opportunity that is too consequential to be reduced to another partisan quarrel over whether petrol should be cheap or expensive.
Indeed, the NLC, its traditional allies in civil society as well as all other activist components – #EndSARS Digital Youth Mobilization Network, Good Governance and Anti-Corruption CSOs; The Take It Back Movement and RevolutionNow; Accountability and Human Rights Coalitions; etc. – could do something more useful with the debate to sanitise Nigeria’s 2027 political campaign.
Given that Atiku’s new position has significantly rattled the aura of arrogance and orthodoxy in President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s seemingly impulsive removal of fuel subsidy signals the reopening of the old contestations on deregulation of the downstream sector of the petroleum industry, fuel price increase, privatisation, devaluation of the naira and other neo-liberal policies between the NLC and previous governments, including all past military dictatorships.
The former vice-president, who supported subsidy removal during the 2023 campaign, now argues that Nigerians have endured enormous hardship without seeing commensurate benefits from the resources supposedly freed by the policy. His campaign has promised that if elected in 2027, Atiku will restore fuel subsidy, noting that the Tinubu government has mismanaged the money saved from removing subsidy instead of using it to help in reducing poverty, strengthen security, and create jobs. In other words, Atiku, who was an advocate of fuel subsidy removal until recently, now believes the policy deeply hurts ordinary people.
For Labour, this new position is a yes-yes, a bravo, not necessarily because subsidy restoration is automatically the right economic prescription, but because it has reopened a question that has forged its history. In addition to that, Nigerians have every right to ask: what, precisely, have Nigerians other than those in power gained in return for the tones of pain of subsidy removal?
While President Tinubu’s argument that the old subsidy regime became unsustainable due to the large scale opacity, rent-seeking, questionable accounting and generalised corruption, his government, and of course, those of his predecessors, often place emphasis more on the point that petroleum products were too cheaply priced; and that the beneficiaries were not the common people subsidy was targeted at.
Organise Labour had, in the past, not only contested with street protests, but also with well-articulated documents that petrol is not an ordinary commodity in Nigeria. One of the most profound conclusions of the NLC, contained in the “Report of the Committee on Deregulation”, argued that in a country starved of dependable public transport and electricity, subsidy on petroleum products are necessary to power generators, move workers and food, keep small enterprises alive. The report then warned that deregulation or increase in the prices of products, all being synonyms of subsidy withdrawal, do not end at the filling station but automatically translate to increase in the cost of almost everything.
Essentially, on the basis of its history of struggle against fuel subsidy removal, and in the context of President Tinubu’s total removal of the subsidy in order to free resources for a so-called national development, Organised Labour ought to have long before now be demanding for where the saved resources have been put: Hospitals? Schools? Electricity? Mass transportation? Jobs? Social protection? Productive capacity? This is precisely where Atiku’s intervention has become politically useful to Organised Labour and civil society.
Of course, Atiku himself will be subjected to the same interrogation in a way that his sudden conversion from subsidy removal apostle to proposing its restoration must be tested to be real and not mere electoral rhetoric. Now that he is a born-again missionary of subsidy, he must tell Nigerians the cost, funding mechanism, duration, beneficiaries, legal architecture and safeguards against subsidy corruption. His proposed model must be demonstrably different from the subsidy bazaar Nigerians have already endured.
As critical and patriotic moderators of our political economy, the NLC, Trade Union Congress of Nigeria (TUC) and the traditional progressive civil society allies of Labour possess something Nigeria’s political parties desperately lack: a national constituency organised around the everyday economic interests of working people.
Secondly, the Labour constituency has fought fuel price increases, mobilised against subsidy removal and participated repeatedly in battles over the economic social contract. Its legitimacy, therefore, does not rest merely on the ability to shut down the country but can and should be activated and expanded to the ability to make politicians answer serious questions or face the consequences at the polls.
The Atiku gambit should therefore be seized as an opening to demand that every presidential candidate submit to the same economic examination that goes beyond the question of “will you restore subsidy?” Under this methodology, Organised Labour can demand of all candidates their fuel-pricing policy; plan for domestic refining; what will happen to public transportation; how wages will relate to inflation; electricity generation and pricing strategy; industrial policy; creation of decent jobs; the fate of pensioners; the question of social protection financing; accountability system for petroleum revenues; and, above all, the kind of economy they propose to build for Nigeria.
Apart from becoming politically involved beyond claiming to be owners of a Labour Party that has essentially become the platform for losers from its class enemies, organised labour stands to smoothly transit from a movement that habitually reacts to government policy into a democratic institution that helps determine the policy agenda before Nigerians vote.
There is already a template to follow. Ahead of the 2023 election, Organised Labour articulated a Workers’ Charter of Demands, including functioning refineries, reduced dependence on imported petroleum products, decent jobs and a transition from a consumption economy to a production economy. The idea deserves not merely revival but enlargement as we gravitate towards 2027. Long before the creation of this charter, the NLC had put a lot of resources and faculty into developing a comprehensive document on developmental state.
Imagine the NLC taking a Citizens’ Economic Charter to every presidential candidate not as an endorsement of Atiku, Tinubu, Peter Obi or anybody else, but as a national leadership examination paper for every candidate to answer to be published for Nigerians to assess and compare. Or setting up town-hall meetings to objectively interrogate their agenda beyond the manifestoes that candidates hardly made any inputs. This might perhaps make campaign promises to become measurable commitments rather than the usual rhetoric of political salvation at campaign rallies. Will that not be a far more sophisticated exercise of electoral power for organised labour than the ‘strategy of threat’ to vote against “anti-worker” politicians?
Apart from introducing some intellectualism into our electioneering, it could also help Nigeria escape the dangerous rhetoric of identity and confessional politics. A bus driver in any town, a teacher in every public and private school, a trader in any market, a farmer in every rural community, civil servants in Abuja and all state capitals and young graduates anywhere in the country may possess different ethnic and religious identities, but they can all suffer when transport becomes unaffordable, electricity unreliable and food prices prohibitive. Bread-and-butter economics can therefore unite where political identity often divides.
Labour must, however, guard against becoming the electoral machinery of any politician. If Atiku proposes subsidy restoration, Labour must interrogate the proposal. If Tinubu defends removal, Labour must demand an account of the savings and the benefits. If another candidate proposes an entirely different economic architecture, that candidate must face precisely the same scrutiny. That way, Labour will sanitise the 2027 campaign; not by choosing the candidate, but by raising the standard by which candidates are judged.
That the old subsidy regime was abused cannot, honestly, be denied. But neither can the hardship unleashed by its removal be dismissed merely because government finances improved or investors applauded the reform. Both realities can co-exist. A responsible economic policy must be fiscally sustainable and socially legitimate; it must protect macro-economic stability without treating household survival as collateral damage.
So, let Atiku’s subsidy gambit provoke something larger than another presidential exchange of accusations counter-accusations and name-calling. Let it compel Labour to ask every candidate the question Nigerians should have been asking all along: What exactly are you offering to make our lives better?
If the NLC can turn that question into the organising principle of the 2027 campaign, Atiku may inadvertently have given Nigerian democracy something considerably more valuable than a subsidy proposal. He may have helped open the door to an election in which ideas, policies and measurable performance finally matter more than tribe, creed and political pedigree.
Onah is the Editor-in-Chief of NATIONAL RECORD and writes this column every Wednesday. Send reactions via email to: nationalrecordng@gmail.com, onahiduh@yahoo.co.uk. WhatsApp: +234 8033209749
