From “No Looking Back” to a ₦30 Discount: Who Is Minding Tinubu’s Message?

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On October 1, President Bola Tinubu went on national television and told Nigerians that the hard part was over. “The emergency treatment is over,” he said. “The age of reform has done its work. Now begins the age of prosperity.” He compared Nigeria to a cancer patient who had wisely refused morphine. He warned the country against “influential but regressive voices” pushing for a “return… to the abuse of addictive subsidies.” He ended with words meant to sound final: “No looking back.”

Seven days later, the government looked back.

On Thursday, October 8, Finance Minister and Coordinating Minister of the Economy Taiwo Oyedele told a press briefing in Abuja that NNPC Limited would sell petrol at cost for 30 days, with priority given to public transporters. He added a negotiated ceiling of ₦1,350 per litre on landing costs. He was careful to say it was “not a subsidy.” Presidential spokesman Bayo Onanuga agreed that it was “neither subsidy nor price control.”

The label matters less than the message. A President who had just declared victory over the subsidy mindset left his minister to announce a price intervention a week later. The policy was not the problem; the order of events was. Nigerians heard the President say no to relief, then watched a technocrat offer a small version of it.

And it is small. NNPC pumps are already selling at about ₦1,360 to ₦1,380 per litre, so selling at cost cuts prices by somewhere between ₦10 and ₦30. An Abuja taxi driver did the maths for the BBC: even if he bought 50 litres, he would save less than ₦1,000. “So what is the difference?” he asked. The government has not given a convincing answer.

This would be a minor communications slip if it stood alone. It does not. On August 27, after meeting state governors, the President promised cheaper transport fares “from October 1,” backed by CNG buses and electric vehicles. On September 19 he went further: “These are not projections. Nigerians are already experiencing these savings.”

On October 2, Daily Trust sent reporters to motor parks across about 20 states. What they found contradicts the State House. Sokoto to Birnin Kebbi has gone from ₦3,500 to ₦5,000. Damaturu to Maiduguri has doubled from ₦2,000 to ₦4,000. Yenagoa to Lagos, once about ₦38,000, now costs up to ₦50,000. In Jigawa, petrol that sold for about ₦950 now goes for up to ₦1,500 a litre. Bauchi has no CNG station at all. In Edo, the promised CNG buses were still parked at Government House. The federal answer to a country of more than 200 million people is 61 buses.

The official figures tell the same story. Headline inflation eased to 15.39 per cent in August, which the President can fairly call progress from the peak. But food inflation stands at 19.57 per cent, after reaching 20.31 per cent in July, its highest level since September 2025. Households do not spend headline inflation. They spend it on rice, garri, transport fares and school fees. Telling families that inflation “has fallen substantially” while their market bills keep rising is not reassurance. It reads as being out of touch.

That raises the obvious question: where are the President’s strategists?

They are not idle. Former Zamfara governor Abdulaziz Yari, Director-General of the APC Presidential Campaign Council, has announced that the council will be inaugurated at the Villa on October 14, with a flag-off rally in Kaduna on October 24, then Port Harcourt and Maiduguri. Imo governor Hope Uzodimma is playing a key role. Dr. Betta Edu, working with the First Lady, is targeting 40 million women voters across 176,846 communities. The Secretary to the Government of the Federation, George Akume, is citing the 1999 North-South rotation agreement as an argument for a second term. Yari himself has been taunting the opposition, asking whether its candidate can “control one state in the South.”

This is the familiar work of Nigerian elections: governors, structures, zoning and making the opposition look weak. What is missing is anyone visibly in charge of the one issue that will decide how Nigerians feel when they reach the polling unit, which is the cost of living. The campaign is building a machine. Nobody seems to be shaping the message that machine will carry.

The result is a government that reacts instead of leading. It sets a deadline and misses it. It rejects subsidies, then softens its position within a week. It offers relief that lasts 30 days, which means the discount expires in early November, just as the campaign rallies get going. Unless it is extended, the President’s flag-off season will coincide with pump prices going back up.

The opposition has already taken the opening. Atiku Abubakar called the discount a “panic-driven publicity stunt” and asked the question every commuter is asking: “What will happen on Day 31?” The Obidient Movement put it more sharply: after three years of being told the pain was necessary, why is a discount suddenly possible now?

Those are fair questions, and the Presidency has itself to blame for them. If relief was affordable, it should have come from the President on October 1, with a timeline, a figure and his own name behind it. If it was not affordable, it should not have been improvised a week later and announced by someone else.

Nigerians have absorbed a great deal since May 2023. They do not need another speech about Red Seas and Promised Lands. They need a fare that falls, a price that holds and a promise that is kept on the day it was set. The President’s strategists can fill stadiums in Kaduna and Port Harcourt. But a campaign whose biggest challenge is the price of food and fuel cannot keep treating that issue as something to handle with announcements. Voters will judge the government on what they pay at the pump and the motor park, not on what it says at press briefings.