More than the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential campaign council thought possible, former vice president Atiku Abubakar has appeared to put some order into his campaign despite his poor choices and constant dithering. He has multiple legal suits targeting President Bola Tinubu in the United States, another youth corps certificate snafu against the same man, a foreign lobbyist spewing out massive falsehoods against the president, and a facile and populist fuel subsidy campaign, this time touching on the bellies of mostly the ignorant and urban poor who care little about the dynamics of economics. The former vice president has carefully curated these campaign issues, with the president as the only target, and has pursued those issues with fanatical zeal. The fusillade may have caught the president’s team off-guard.
The subsidy issue appears to be Alhaji Atiku’s most impactful public offering so far. His economics is undoubtedly simplistic, but he has nonetheless doubled down on his overwrought analysis. He has linked the removal of fuel subsidy to the hardship experienced by many Nigerians, but he has deliberately neglected to talk about the immense gains the policy has brought which are now trickling down. He would reinstate a modified form of the subsidy, he said, without indicating how he would preserve the current policy’s massive gains or, contrastingly, police his subsidy plan against business sharks. That he is borrowing from the rule books of populism and fascism can certainly not have escaped his attention, nor that he is merely engaging in time-tested election subterfuge over a policy he could not hope to implement should he win.
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