ANALYSIS: Didn’t Nigerians Once Vote for Fuel Subsidy Removal? by Lawal Dahiru Mamman

ANALYSIS: Didn’t Nigerians Once Vote for Fuel Subsidy Removal?

By Lawal Dahiru Mamman,

There was this post in one nationwide paper in 2016 about falling naira worth taking a toll on shopping. It remembered with fond memories how in 1984, a bachelor living in Lagos’s Maza-Maza residential area might purchase a tin of garri for 9, an “olodo” of beans for 5, a bottle of oil for 2.20, a package of sugar for 50 kobo, and finish a week’s shopping, consisting of fish, bread, pepper, and transportation, for approximately 26.20.

Base pay then stood at about 125 a month. The naira still commanded regard; one dollar exchanged for less than 1. That modest list has actually ended up being a peaceful nationwide parable of worn down acquiring power. Those who lived it question what failed while those who did not hear such accounts like a fairy tale.

Long before that shopping list, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti had actually currently called the condition. In his 1976 track Yellow Fever, he noted the fevers affecting the country consisting of malaria, jaundice, influenza and after that “Inflation fever nko? (He dey!)”.

Because tune, the Afrobeat legend dealt with increasing costs as a persistent nationwide condition, one Nigeria has actually fought, with differing strength, for generations.

4 years after the 1984 wish list, Nigeria faces another sharp episode of cost modification. President Bola Tinubu’s administration got rid of the fuel aid in May 2023 and merged the numerous exchange-rate windows, successfully drifting the naira in his notorious “aid is gone” inauguration speech.

Fuel costs increased several-fold in instant action to the statement. Authorities and parallel rates assembled at much weaker levels. Heading inflation, currently raised near 22 percent in early 2023, reached a peak of 34.8 percent by December 2024 on the old Consumer Price Index (CPI) series.

Food inflation approached or surpassed 40 percent at points. After the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) rebased the CPI in 2025, year-on-year rates moderated, reaching the mid-teens by late 2025. Genuine earnings for numerous homes contracted greatly in the interim.

These were not odd technical steps. They attended to enduring financial drains pipes and distortions. Aid payments that had actually swollen into trillions of naira every year, frequently accompanied by accusations of opacity and elite capture, and a multiple-window forex system that developed big arbitrage chances while starving efficient sectors of transparent access to dollars.

With the federal government of the day dealing with all kinds of criticism from the “unfavorable” effect of these policies, it likewise got here with a political pedigree that welcomes a direct concern, and the concern is, was their adoption not itself a kind of nationwide agreement?

In the 2023 governmental election, eighteen prospects objected to. They consisted of Christopher Imumolen of the Accord Party (AP), Hamza al-Mustapha of the Action Alliance (AA), Yabagi Sani of the Action Democratic Party (ADP), Osita Nnadi of the Action Peoples Party (APP), Omoyele Sowore of the African Action Congress (AAC), Dumebi Kachikwu of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Peter Umeadi of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), and Princess Chichi Ojei of the Allied Peoples Movement (APM).

The staying prospects were Sunday Adenuga of the Boot Party (BP), Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP), Felix Osakwe of the National Rescue Movement (NRM), Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP), Kola Abiola of the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP), Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Adewole Adebayo of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), Malik Ado-Ibrahim of the Young Progressive Party (YPP), and Daniel Nwanyanwu of the Zenith Labour Party (ZLP).

The 3 who completed initially, 2nd and 3rd, Tinubu (APC, 36.61 percent with 8.79 million votes), Atiku Abubakar (PDP, 29.07 percent with 6.98 million votes) and Peter Obi (Labour Party (LP), 25.40 percent with 6.10 million votes), had actually all campaigned on variations of the very same core reforms.

Tinubu’s manifesto mentioned phasing out the fuel aid while safeguarding the social agreement and rerouting cost savings. Atiku required an instant evaluation of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) aid costs to complimentary financial resources and for getting rid of interventionist exchange-rate distortions.

Obi on his part promised to streamline the exchange-rate routine, end the multiple-window system that subsidised the fortunate, and minimize dependence on imported refined items through domestic refining rewards, efficiently ending the aid program. Together these 3 prospects got approximately 91 percent of the legitimate votes cast.

Prospects who took clearer contrary positions, significantly Omoyele Sowore of the AAC, who refuted getting rid of the aid and firmly insisted the genuine issue was elite scams in the system and, to a substantial degree, Rabiu Kwankwaso of the NNPP, who completed 4th with 6.23 percent, got far smaller sized shares.

Taking a better look and passing the worths provided, the electorate, by the math of the main outcomes, mainly passed over Kwankwaso and Sowore.

None of this eliminates the difficulty that followed. Transfer expenses, food costs and the expense of living increased quickly. Numerous families experienced real distress. Advocates of the reforms argue that the previous system was fiscally unsustainable, that aid funds were improperly targeted, that a more market-reflective currency exchange rate was needed to bring in financial investment and end persistent deficiency, which the short-term discomfort is the needed cost of longer-term correction.

Critics now counter that the timing, sequencing and lack of sufficient countervailing steps enhanced the shock, that inflation and hardship deepened, which the advantages of greater federal government incomes and better reserves have yet to equate adequately into broad-based relief.

The information record both the pre-reform distortions and the post-reform change. The electoral math records that the prospects who honestly backed the instructions of these policies protected the frustrating bulk of votes.

Whether that makes up a long lasting nationwide agreement and whether the subsequent execution has actually validated the electoral option is a judgement each reader should form for themselves. Before we damn the reforms, maybe we should initially ask ourselves the more vital concern: did we not choose them?