Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has put the economic consequences of Nigeria’s reform programme at the centre of his 2027 presidential campaign, proposing a return to targeted petrol subsidies, possible student-loan forgiveness and a $10 billion financing programme for young people and women.
The African Democratic Congress presidential candidate’s 12-point policy agenda, released on Sunday, goes beyond reversing individual policies of President Bola Tinubu’s administration.
It proposes a different model of government in which the federal government would be smaller, states and local councils would exercise more authority, and government spending would be redirected towards reducing household costs and expanding economic opportunity.
Atiku’s proposals arrive after three years in which Nigeria has undergone some of its most disruptive economic reforms in decades.
Tinubu removed the petrol subsidy shortly after taking office in May 2023 and pursued a major currency reform, decisions that improved some fiscal and market indicators but also drove up living costs.
The World Bank estimated that the subsidy removal could generate more than ₦11 trillion in fiscal savings by the end of 2025.
But by 2026, the debate had shifted from whether the subsidy should disappear to whether the savings had translated into better public finances and living standards. The IMF said estimated savings from subsidy removal had not appeared to accrue to the federal budget in 2025.
That creates the central political opening for Atiku: whether Nigeria should preserve painful reforms and improve their implementation, or partially reverse them to provide immediate relief to households.
Atiku is betting on the cost of reform
Atiku has previously made the return of petrol subsidies one of his clearest campaign positions.
In August, he said his position had not changed and that he would restore the subsidy if elected, arguing that Nigerians had not benefited sufficiently from the savings generated by its removal.
His new proposal is more narrowly framed as a targeted subsidy intended to reduce transport costs and the broader cost of living, rather than an explicit return to the previous system.
That distinction matters because the old subsidy became one of Nigeria’s largest fiscal burdens. International financial institutions had long argued that the policy disproportionately benefited wealthier households and created opportunities for leakage while consuming resources that could have been directed towards infrastructure and social programmes.
Atiku is therefore proposing not simply to bring back an old policy, but to make cheaper mobility a deliberate social-policy instrument.
The unresolved question is how a future administration would identify beneficiaries, prevent arbitrage and finance the programme without recreating the fiscal pressures that helped make the original subsidy unsustainable.
His student-loan proposal targets a policy that is still being built
Atiku’s proposed review of NELFUND would also directly challenge one of the federal government’s newer economic policies.
Nigeria’s current student-loan framework provides interest-free loans for eligible students, with repayment beginning after specified periods following national service.
NELFUND’s own portal says the programme is designed to cover institutional charges and upkeep, while its terms provide for repayment through mechanisms including deductions from income.
Atiku wants the system reviewed and says some student debt could be forgiven, arguing that access to higher education should not leave graduates carrying burdensome debt.
The proposal would shift the political argument from how to expand student lending to whether tertiary education should be financed primarily as a public investment rather than through repayable loans.
NELFUND says more than 1.39 million students have registered on its platform and reports more than 1.69 million loan applications, illustrating how quickly the programme has become part of Nigeria’s education-financing architecture.
Local government autonomy becomes an election test
Atiku’s promise to enforce local government autonomy is less a new constitutional idea than a pledge to implement a Supreme Court ruling that has already changed the legal landscape.
In July 2024, the Supreme Court ruled that state governments could not retain or use allocations belonging to the country’s 774 local government areas and ordered that such funds be paid directly to local councils. It also rejected the use of caretaker arrangements in place of democratically elected councils.
Atiku is making implementation of that ruling part of his campaign.
The broader implication is a potential redistribution of political and financial power away from state governors.
If local councils actually controlled their statutory allocations, governors would lose part of the financial leverage they have historically exercised over the third tier of government.
That makes local government reform one of the more politically consequential parts of Atiku’s programme, even though it is presented alongside economic policies such as subsidies and entrepreneurship finance.
The eastern ports proposal is also an industrial strategy
Atiku’s plan for Port Harcourt, Calabar and Warri reflects a longstanding problem in Nigerian logistics: the country’s maritime economy remains heavily concentrated around Lagos.
His proposal is to revive the eastern port corridor while supporting the development of the Ibom Deep Sea Port, which he refers to as the Uyo Deep Sea Port.
The project is not merely theoretical. The Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission lists the Ibom Deep Sea Port as a proposed greenfield deep-sea port and free-trade-zone project intended to handle containers, petroleum products, crude oil, natural gas, vehicles and bulk trade.
But the project has also illustrated the difficulty of converting Nigerian infrastructure ambitions into operating assets.
The ICRC records no correspondence on the project since 2018 in its project-development database, while the Akwa Ibom government has more recently been working with prospective partners on feasibility and investment plans.
Atiku’s proposal therefore ties regional political representation to a wider economic question: whether Nigeria can build several competitive trade gateways instead of forcing a disproportionate share of imports and exports through Lagos.
His border pledge has already exposed a political fault line
Atiku also wants Nigeria’s land borders reopened to legitimate commercial activity.
But this is already disputed by the federal government.
Interior Minister Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo said in August that Nigeria’s borders were not closed and therefore could not simply be “reopened”.
The government said several major crossings had already reopened, including Seme, Illela, Maigatari and Mfum under the previous administration, while Kamba and Tsamiya were reopened in February 2026.
The disagreement is revealing because it is partly about terminology and partly about policy.
Atiku is speaking to traders who experienced restrictions and disruption after Nigeria’s 2019 border policy and to businesses that remain affected by tighter controls at some crossings.
The government, meanwhile, argues that security, customs enforcement and controlled trade—not unrestricted movement—are the appropriate model.
The election debate is therefore likely to become less about whether every Nigerian border is physically shut and more about how open Nigeria should be to regional commerce.
Electricity reform would target the tariff system itself
Atiku’s electricity proposal similarly takes aim at a reform structure rather than simply promising cheaper power.
Nigeria’s electricity tariff system classifies customers according to the minimum number of hours of supply they are expected to receive. Under the service-based tariff system, Band A customers are supposed to receive at least 20 hours daily, while Bands B to E have progressively lower service expectations.
The system was intended to connect what consumers pay with the quality of service they receive.
Atiku’s proposal to review the classification structure suggests that his campaign sees the problem not only as high prices but also as the way customers are grouped and billed.
That would put a future Atiku administration in conflict with one of the central principles of Nigeria’s electricity-market reforms: tariffs that increasingly reflect the cost of supplying power rather than politically controlled prices.
The $10 billion promise is the biggest financing question
The most ambitious financial commitment in the programme is a proposed $10 billion startup and entrepreneurship fund for young people and women.
Atiku has not, in the policy announcement, provided a detailed financing structure for the fund, including how much would come from the federal budget, development institutions, private investors or commercial lenders.
That omission is important.
Nigeria’s young population creates a large potential market for entrepreneurship finance, but a $10 billion programme would require a funding architecture substantially larger than a conventional government grant scheme.
The credibility of the proposal will therefore depend less on the headline amount than on whether Atiku’s campaign can explain who would manage the fund, how businesses would qualify, how defaults would be handled and how political interference would be prevented.
The programme also promises greater representation for young people and women in government appointments, linking access to capital with access to political power.
The bigger promise is a smaller federal government
The final part of Atiku’s programme may ultimately prove more consequential than the individual pledges.
He wants to restructure the Exclusive and Concurrent Legislative Lists, transfer more responsibilities to states and local governments and create a leaner federal government.
He also wants to implement the Oronsaye Report, which recommended restructuring government agencies to eliminate duplication and reduce the size and cost of the federal bureaucracy.
This is not the first time an administration has promised to implement the report. The Buhari administration said in 2022 that its recommendations were undergoing review before implementation.
Atiku’s proposal therefore confronts a problem that has survived successive governments: Nigeria has repeatedly identified duplication and inefficiency in the federal bureaucracy but struggled to turn institutional reform into sustained reductions in government costs.
Taken together, the 12 points amount to a different theory of the Nigerian state.
Atiku is promising more immediate intervention to reduce household costs, while simultaneously promising to reduce the federal government’s footprint and move responsibilities downward to states and local councils.
That combination will be the difficult part to reconcile.
A subsidy costs money. A $10 billion entrepreneurship programme requires capital. More security personnel require recurrent spending.
Healthcare reform requires higher investment. Yet Atiku is also proposing a smaller federal government and the elimination of duplicated agencies.
The 2027 campaign will therefore have to answer a question that the 12-point document does not yet fully resolve: how much will the programme cost, who will pay for it, and which existing expenditures will be cut to make room for it?
Those details may ultimately determine whether “Rescue, Revive and Restore” becomes a campaign slogan or a workable alternative to the economic model Nigeria has pursued since 2023.
