by The Atlantic Digest Nigeria Desk
Saturday, September 6, 2026
Oyo State Governor Seyi Makinde has issued a pointed challenge to the terms of Nigeria’s ongoing fuel subsidy debate, arguing that the national conversation has been wrongly framed as a binary choice between subsidising petroleum products and forcing citizens to pay full market prices, and that Nigerians should not be made to bear the cost of government’s own failure to secure the country’s borders.
What Makinde actually said
Writing in the latest edition of his personal newsletter, The Business of Governance, Makinde argued that the real issue confronting Nigeria is not whether to subsidise fuel or not, but whether the country, as an oil-producing nation, possesses a petroleum pricing framework that is fair, transparent, and structured to let citizens actually benefit from the natural resources they own. “For years, the debate in Nigeria has largely been presented as a choice between subsidising petroleum products or allowing Nigerians to pay the full market price,” Makinde wrote, before setting out what he believes citizens are actually owed: clarity on the specific assumptions that determine pump prices. “What Nigerians deserve to know is the current pricing framework and the assumptions that determine what we pay at the pump: the crude price benchmark, refining costs and margins, exchange-rate assumptions, logistics and distribution costs, taxes and levies, and the other variables included in that calculation,” he said.
The governor reserved his sharpest language for the argument, advanced by some policymakers, that Nigerians should accept higher pump prices specifically to close the price gap that makes smuggling fuel into neighbouring countries profitable. Makinde rejected this framing outright: “We should also reject the argument that Nigerians must pay more for petroleum products simply to eliminate the price difference that makes smuggling into neighbouring countries profitable.” His underlying argument is a matter of institutional responsibility rather than economics: border security is constitutionally and practically the government’s job, and its failure to adequately police Nigeria’s frontiers should not translate into a policy that quietly transfers that failure’s cost onto ordinary citizens at the pump.
The alternative Makinde says is coming
Notably, Makinde did not simply criticise the current framework; he disclosed that he intends to unveil an alternative approach to Nigeria’s petroleum pricing system in the coming weeks, and explicitly invited Nigerians to judge that proposal on its own merits once revealed. He framed this within his broader “Reset Nigeria” initiative, arguing that genuine reform requires interrogating the underlying system itself rather than simply litigating whether subsidy should return or remain removed. “Reset Nigeria means being willing to interrogate the system itself. The petroleum question should therefore not simply be whether subsidy should return or remain removed,” Makinde said. “It should be whether the pricing system we are using is the right one for Nigeria and whether it allows Nigerians to derive a fair benefit from the natural resources they own.”
This positions Makinde’s intervention as distinct from the binary already dominating national debate between the Tinubu administration’s full subsidy removal and Atiku Abubakar’s production-linked crude subsidy proposal, both extensively covered in this newspaper’s recent editions. Rather than aligning with either side of that fight, Makinde is effectively proposing a third framework, one built around pricing transparency and structural fairness rather than a simple restore-or-maintain choice, though the specific mechanics of his forthcoming proposal remain undisclosed pending its formal unveiling.
The political context: an increasingly vocal Tinubu critic
Makinde’s intervention on subsidy policy is consistent with a broader pattern of increasingly open friction between the Oyo governor and the Tinubu administration over the past year. In December 2025, Makinde publicly declared he would not support President Tinubu’s 2027 re-election bid, a significant reversal given that Makinde had supported Tinubu’s 2023 campaign, a decision he has since said he regrets. He grounded that reversal in concern over what he described as the administration’s growing push toward a de facto one-party state. That declaration triggered immediate political pushback, including allegations from former Governor Ayodele Fayose that the Federal Government had handed Makinde ₦50 billion, a claim Makinde’s camp has denied and which Fayose was unable to substantiate with evidence of actual disbursement.
Makinde has also previously and separately disputed federal officials’ public characterisations of state-level financial support, directly contradicting Senate President Godswill Akpabio’s claim that states received ₦30 billion each from federal revenue agencies, clarifying that Oyo State received no such funds and that, as Vice Chairman of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum, he could confirm the same applied to his colleague governors. He has additionally criticised the current administration’s approach to legislative consultation, contrasting it unfavourably with the more consultative style he associated with former Vice President Yemi Osinbajo’s tenure chairing the National Economic Council, specifically citing the federal government’s handling of the controversial tax reform bill as an instance where dissenting state-level views were not meaningfully considered.
Why it matters
Makinde’s latest intervention adds a notable third voice to Nigeria’s fuel subsidy debate at a moment when the dispute between the Tinubu administration and Atiku Abubakar over subsidy design, previously reported extensively in this newspaper, has already exposed a lack of public clarity on core pricing assumptions, one that this newspaper reported the Presidency had not fully resolved despite Atiku’s specific demand for a detailed reconciliation of the ₦15.8 trillion subsidy-removal savings figure the government has cited. By explicitly demanding transparency on the crude benchmark, exchange-rate assumptions, and logistics costs baked into pump prices, Makinde has effectively echoed, from within the Tinubu-critical wing of Nigeria’s political establishment, the same core transparency demand Atiku’s campaign has been making, even as the two men occupy different positions in the run-up to 2027, Makinde as a sitting PDP governor not currently a presidential contender himself, and Atiku as the ADC’s declared candidate.
Whether Makinde’s forthcoming pricing proposal offers a genuinely new framework capable of reshaping the national conversation, or whether it ultimately aligns closely with positions already staked out by Atiku or the administration once its details are revealed, remains to be seen. What is already clear is that fuel pricing transparency, not merely the binary of subsidise-or-don’t, is emerging as an increasingly central and contested question heading into the 2027 election cycle. The Atlantic Digest will continue to follow this story and will report in detail once Makinde formally unveils his alternative petroleum pricing proposal.
