Nigeria's petrol subsidy was born of the 1973 oil shock. With crude prices quadrupling, the Gowon government held the domestic pump price at 6 kobo per litre — a deliberate redistribution of the windfall to ordinary Nigerians. By the end of Gowon's tenure in 1975, Nigeria had the cheapest petrol on earth.
Fifty years of subsequent attempts to remove or reduce the subsidy:
- Murtala/Obasanjo I (1976): 8.45 kobo per litre — first increase, protests in Lagos.
- Shagari (1982): 15.30 kobo — austerity programme.
- Buhari I (1984): 20 kobo — under IMF pressure he later rejected.
- Babangida (1986–1993): four increases, from 39.5 kobo to ₦5 — SAP-era.
- Abacha (1994): ₦11 then ₦15 — Major-General Aliyu Mohammed's price commission.
- Abdulsalami (1999): ₦20 — pre-handover increase.
- Obasanjo II (2000–2007): seven increases, from ₦22 to ₦75 — most contested presidency on subsidy.
- Yar'Adua (2008): ₦65 — partial reversal to defuse protests.
- Jonathan (1 January 2012): ₦141 — Occupy Nigeria, a week of national strike, reversed to ₦97.
- Buhari II (May 2016): ₦145 — described as 'price adjustment, not subsidy removal'.
- Buhari II (March 2020 – COVID): ₦125, then floated upward through 2022.
- Tinubu (29 May 2023 inauguration speech): 'subsidy is gone' — pump price moved from ₦185 to ₦617 within 48 hours, and to over ₦900 by December 2023, ₦1,030 by Q2 2024.
The Occupy Nigeria protests of January 2012, triggered by the Jonathan-era removal, were the largest non-electoral mass mobilisation in post-1999 Nigeria — eight days of national strike led by the NLC, TUC and a coalition of civil-society and youth groups (notably Save Nigeria Group, the Joint Action Front, and the just-emerging Twitter/X-based youth networks that would later organise End SARS). Government conceded a partial reversal; the underlying fiscal problem was deferred for eleven years.
The Tinubu 2023 removal is structurally different. It was announced on the first day of the administration with no fiscal-buffer mechanism in place, the Naira was simultaneously devalued (see Naira devaluations), and the combination produced the sharpest one-year cost-of-living shock in Nigeria's history outside the 1986 SAP and 1993 IBB inflation. Headline inflation hit 34.6 percent in November 2024, with food inflation at 39.9 percent. The promised palliatives — ₦25,000 cash transfers to 15 million households, CNG bus conversions, a new minimum wage — arrived late, partially, and in some states not at all. See also Occupy Nigeria 2012.
Figure 1
Fuel subsidy paid vs federal oil revenue, 2006–2023 (₦ billion)
By 2022, the subsidy bill exceeded ₦4.3 trillion — more than half of every naira earned from crude was being burned at the pump.