On 1 January 2012 the government of President Goodluck Jonathan, acting on advice from Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Petroleum Minister Diezani Alison-Madueke, removed the petroleum products subsidy without warning. Pump price of PMS rose from ₦65 to ₦141 per litre overnight (+117%), the largest single-day price shock in Nigerian consumer-economy history.
The response was the largest urban protest movement in Nigerian history. Occupy Nigeria — coordinated by the Save Nigeria Group (Tunde Bakare, Pastor Tunde Bakare, Pat Utomi), Enough is Enough Nigeria (Yemi Adamolekun, 'Chude' Jideonwo), the Nigeria Labour Congress (Abdulwaheed Omar), the Trade Union Congress (Peter Esele), and a wide civil-society coalition — ran from 2 to 16 January 2012 with continuous occupations at Gani Fawehinmi Park, Ojota (Lagos), Eagle Square Abuja, and city centres in Kano, Kaduna, Ibadan, Port Harcourt, Calabar and Benin City. The NLC general strike (9–14 January 2012) shut the banks, airports, ports and most federal offices.
Official death toll: 8 (Lagos and Kano shootings by police). Approximately 50 injured in Kano, Ilorin and Lagos. The Federal Government's House of Representatives Ad-hoc Committee on the Verification of the Actual Subsidy Requirement (Farouk Lawan, April 2012) found $6.8bn had been corruptly paid out of the subsidy account in 2011 alone; the Aig-Imoukhuede Petroleum Revenue Special Task Force (Nuhu Ribadu, 2012) returned similar findings. The political settlement of 16 January 2012 reinstated the subsidy partially at ₦97/litre and committed the FG to publish monthly subsidy payments — a commitment honoured only for two months.
The subsidy was finally fully removed by President Tinubu on 29 May 2023 in his inaugural address. PMS price rose from ₦197 to ₦617 in the same week, the naira was simultaneously floated, and the cumulative impact triggered the #EndBadGovernance hunger protests of August 2024. Twelve years apart, the policy was the same; the protests were the same; the deaths were the same; and no underlying reform of refining capacity, downstream regulation or subsidy administration was made in the intervening period.