Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and the African Democratic Congress presidential candidate have criticised the Federal Government’s Compressed Natural Gas conversion programme, describing the conversion of about 120,000 vehicles in more than three years as inadequate to address the country’s transportation and cost-of-living crises.
Atiku, in a statement issued on Friday by his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, said the figure represented less than one per cent of the estimated 14 million vehicles on Nigerian roads.
He argued that the scale of the conversion showed that the CNG initiative had failed to provide meaningful relief to Nigerians following the removal of the petrol subsidy.
“If Tinubu’s grand strategy for cushioning the consequences of his reckless and poorly thought-out subsidy removal is CNG conversion, then the admission that only about 120,000 vehicles have been converted in more than three years is not an achievement. It is an advertisement of policy failure.
“Against widely cited estimates of roughly 14 million vehicles on Nigerian roads, 120,000 conversions amount to less than one per cent. That is the government’s own number. That is Tinubu marking his own examination script,” Atiku said.
