Moses in the Desert (Part 3): The Blueprint for a Humane Transition

By Ibrahim Nasiru

In my ongoing exchange with defenders of the current economic order, a sophisticated technocratic defense has emerged: that we must separate “flawed implementation” from a “fundamentally correct policy direction.” The argument states that the misery of the desert does not justify returning to the corruptions of the old fuel subsidy regime.

However, this argument falls into a dangerous intellectual trap. It treats policy design and policy execution as two unrelated things. In the real world of governance, a policy designed without the institutional capacity, moral discipline, or infrastructure to execute it successfully is, by definition, a fundamentally bad policy.

You do not demolish a leaking roof in the middle of a torrential downpour and call the resulting pneumonia a “sequencing issue.”

1. Execution IS the Policy

To claim that missing social safety nets and a failure to account for billions in savings are merely “shortcomings in implementation” is a luxury of language that only those insulated from the crisis can afford.

Stripping away a nation’s primary economic baseline without first ensuring stable power, functional public transport, or verified cash transfers is a structural design failure.

You cannot ground all commercial aircraft to fix an engine blueprint while the planes are still in mid-air and call the resulting crashes an “implementation glitch.” If the human cost destroys the productive capacity of the state, the policy has failed on its own terms.

2. The Accountancy Shell Game

Defenders of the policy admit that tracking discrepancies exist regarding where the subsidy savings actually went, but they argue this shouldn’t invalidate the policy itself.

Let us be completely straightforward: If a policy’s primary selling point was to free up public funds for healthcare and infrastructure, but forty years after the ghost of SAP in 1986 [Sufyan, 1986] the state still cannot show the public where those saved billions are, the policy is an unvouched cash grab.

Why shouldn’t questions about accounting be a verdict against the entire policy? In what other sphere of life do you hand your hard-earned resources to a manager who admits they cannot find them, and then praise their strategic direction?

3. Breaking the False Binary: The Third Way

The defenders of the current arrangement challenge critics to provide a realistic alternative, implying that the only option besides this chaotic deregulation is a return to the corrupt, opaque blanket subsidy regime of the past.

This is a false choice. The alternative is not a return to the corrupt status quo; the alternative is humane, strategic, and productive governance. A valid, people-centered economic model would look entirely different:

* Lockstep Deregulation: Any subsidy adjustment should have occurred incrementally and strictly in lockstep with verified domestic refining volumes pouring directly from local refineries into the market, wiping out foreign exchange pressures on fuel imports before the price support was pulled.

* The Auditable Voucher System: True reform would have legally tied every single naira saved directly to a transparent, publicly auditable mass-transit fuel voucher system. Instead of throwing loose cash palliatives down a political pipeline, energy subsidies should have been targeted directly at food transport and public bus networks to cap the cost of living.

* A Binding Covenant on Overhead: A government cannot credibly ask citizens to starve in the wilderness while the leadership class expands its political luxuries. True structural reform begins with a massive, transparent reduction in the cost of governance.

Conclusion: A Journey Requires a Map

We are looking at a volatile market with petrol prices hitting ₦1,500 per litre [NBS, 2026], anchored by forty years of identical failed economic experiments since 1986 [Sufyan, 1986].

Our difference with the defenders of this policy is simple: they look at a broken system and ask for more patience for a theoretical model. We look at the actual human ledger and state an obvious truth: If the state lacks the capacity to protect its citizens from starvation during a transition, it has no business embarking on the journey without a map.

Ibrahim Nasir

Public Affairs Analyst