ABUJA, Nigeria – The vice-presidential candidate of the Nigeria Democratic Congress, Senator Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, FNSE, has vowed that an NDC-led federal administration will reinstate fuel subsidies through a restructured, production-backed intervention to ensure that Nigerian consumers have access to affordable pump prices, national political correspondents monitored in Abuja on Tuesday, September 22, 2026.
Speaking in an exclusive television interview with Arise News on Tuesday evening, the former Kano State governor and former Minister of Defence sharply criticized President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s sudden abolition of the petrol subsidy regime upon assuming office in May 2023, contending that the unilateral policy announcement without cushioning measures precipitated an unprecedented macroeconomic crisis across the federation.
Okay News reports that Kwankwaso argued that while major presidential contenders during the 2023 campaign recognized the fiscal strain of the legacy subsidy framework, the incumbent administration’s uncoordinated day-one termination plunged millions of households into severe economic hardship.
“Among the three of them, Bola Tinubu decided to remove the subsidy,” Kwankwaso said during the broadcast. “And the consequences we thought would happen certainly happened. He removed it immediately, without looking at all the possible issues. That is how we found ourselves in this total mess economically.”
The opposition vice-presidential standard-bearer also directed criticism at former Vice President Alhaji Atiku Abubakar’s policy proposal to privatize Nigeria’s state-owned refineries, describing the concept as ambiguous, conceptually flawed, and driven more by political convenience than viable industrial strategy.
Pressed on whether the joint ticket of Peter Gregory Obi and himself would bring back the controversial fuel subsidy regime if elected in 2027, Kwankwaso affirmed that their administration would implement an innovative supply-side pricing mechanism designed to protect consumer purchasing power without bankrupting the treasury.
“We are bringing subsidy in our own way,” Kwankwaso declared. “If individuals in this country can build refineries, I see no reason why government under certain circumstances will not build refineries to achieve the minimum requirement, for people to buy fuel at a reasonable price. We will do whatever it takes to put the price of oil down.”
Kwankwaso explained that the NDC’s downstream blueprint emphasizes aggressive expansion of both public and modular private refining capacities, ensuring that domestic crude processing completely eliminates foreign refined product freight charges, port demurrage fees, and foreign exchange exposure.
He emphasized that the party’s programmatic approach will not constitute a return to the corrupt era of fraudulent import subsidy claims, but rather an institutionalized framework where the federal government intervenes strategically in energy infrastructure to insulate ordinary citizens from volatile international energy markets.
The former senator’s remarks come as escalating transportation tariffs, food price inflation, and elevated retail premium motor spirit prices continue to dominate public discourse, setting up downstream petroleum deregulation and cost-of-living relief as primary battlegrounds for the 2027 presidential contest.
