Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
There is a difference between a leader and a man who simply wants power. A leader keeps one position and answers for it. A confusionist keeps two, faces whichever direction the crowd is looking, and prays nobody kept the record. We kept the record.
On 11 January 2012, one Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, then national leader of the opposition, published an article attacking the government of President Goodluck Jonathan over fuel subsidy. He branded it the “Jonathan tax”. He warned that the poor would be pushed into deeper misery, that children would cry in hunger, that families would crumble while officials in Abuja congratulated themselves for saving money. The Nigerian Tribune fact-checked that article in 2023 and confirmed it is authentic. He wrote every word.
The prosecutor of 2012 became the defendant of 2023.
Because on 29 May 2023, standing before the nation at his own inauguration, the same man opened his mouth and declared, in three words, that subsidy is gone. No cushion. No plan visible to the naked eye. One sentence, and the tears he once wept for the masses, he inflicted on them himself, in far greater volume.
Now read carefully, because this is where the confusion is exposed.
Let nobody credit Tinubu with any wisdom about phasing. The gradual, measured path to deregulation was never his idea. It was the tested initiative of the Obasanjo and Atiku administration. Between 1999 and 2007 that government drew down the subsidy burden in roughly 7 careful steps, from 20 naira to 75 naira, through the PPPRA framework, allowing the economy to absorb each move. That was the responsible template, and Nigeria already had it.
In January 2012, the Jonathan government moved to complete that removal in a single step, and the pump price rose from 65 naira toward 141 naira. Tinubu seized on it. He did not offer to help refine the process or return to the gradual path. He mounted the barricade, coined the “Jonathan tax”, and cast himself as the great defender of the suffering masses.
And mark this well, because it matters. When the people rose to protest, Jonathan listened. His government stepped back and brought the price down to 97 naira within two weeks. Whatever anyone may argue about the policy, the man heard the cry of the people and answered it.
Now set that beside 2023.
Tinubu did not attempt Jonathan’s single step. He removed the subsidy entirely, in one sentence, overnight, with none of the gradualism the Obasanjo and Atiku years had proven, and none of the restraint even Jonathan had shown. And when the people cried out, as they had in 2012, he did not step back. He told them to endure.
Jonathan heard the people and stepped back. Tinubu heard them and pressed on.
There is the whole confusion in one line. The man who once demanded that a president listen to the masses became a president who would not listen at all. The man who branded a milder policy as heartless cruelty imposed that same policy in its harshest possible form, the moment the applause belonged to him.
And what did the country get for it? Petrol prices that more than tripled almost overnight. Inflation that climbed past 34 per cent, with food inflation above 40 per cent, by the accounts of independent bodies including Human Rights Watch. The worst cost of living crisis in almost 30 years. Even Chief Gani Adams, the Aare Ona Kakanfo of Yorubaland and a son of the same South West, publicly told him the hardship was unbearable and begged him to retrace his steps. Tinubu did not.
The “Jonathan tax” he once cursed did not disappear. It only changed its name and multiplied. Today it wears his own face.
So let no one insult our intelligence by calling this reform. Reform has a spine and a sequence, and that sequence was built by better men before him. What we have witnessed is a man who condemns a thing when condemning it can win him a crowd, then commits it in its cruellest form once the crowd is already his.
That is not leadership. That is confusion elevated to national policy.
WHERE IS THE MONEY
But there is a question that turns this from confusion into scandal, and Tinubu cannot answer it.
His own Finance Ministry boasts of 15.8 trillion naira in savings from the subsidy removal between June 2023 and December 2025. Very well. Then let one honest man in Aso Rock stand up and tell Nigerians where that money is. Is it in the classrooms? Is it in the hospitals? Is it in the pockets of the widow buying garri at triple the price? The people bled for those savings. They are owed an account of every kobo.
They took the subsidy from the poor. Now they cannot show what they did with it.
That is the true crime here. Not merely that a policy was harsh, but that the harshness was demanded of the weakest Nigerians while the promised harvest vanished into silence.
THE HONEST ALTERNATIVE
This is why Atiku Abubakar, the man who built the responsible template in the first place, has now drawn the clear line the country has been waiting for. He has said plainly that he does not chase savings that no one can find, and that a government that cannot account for the people’s sacrifice has no right to demand more of it.
His answer is not to drag Nigeria back into the old wasteful regime of ghost claims and middlemen. His plan, as his team has set out, is to move support from importation to production, from middlemen to our own refineries, from unverifiable paper to verifiable barrels, targeted, capped, budgeted in the open and independently audited. A cushion the poor can feel, and a ledger the public can read.
That is the difference, and no amount of noise can blur it. One man changed his position to comfort the powerful. The other refines his method to relieve the masses, and demands that the stolen savings be recovered from whoever swallowed them.
One revised his stand against the people. The other stands revised for them.
History is patient and history is literal. It will place the 2012 article beside the 2023 speech. It will remember that one president heard the people and relented, while another heard them and pressed on, then lost the money besides. And it will let the record speak. When it does, it will not need one word from me. The verdict is already signed, in his own byline.
Nigerians are not confused about their hunger. Only the man who caused it keeps changing his story.
Same man. Two positions. One suffering nation.
TinubuTheConfusionist
FromJonathanTaxToTinubuTax
WhereIsTheMoney
EnoughIsEnough
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
21 August 2026
