On New Year's Day 2012, with the National Assembly on recess and the population asleep after celebrations, the PPPRA announced that the petrol subsidy had been removed. The pump price moved from ₦65 to ₦141 overnight — a 117% increase.
## The harm before reversal
For eight days, between 2 and 16 January 2012, Lagos, Abuja, Kano, Port Harcourt, Ibadan, Kaduna and Benin City shut down. The NLC and the Trade Union Congress (TUC) called a joint general strike; civil society — Save Nigeria Group, Enough is Enough, the Joint Action Front — organised street occupations of Gani Fawehinmi Freedom Park at Ojota (Lagos), Eagle Square (Abuja) and the Kano Race Course. The Occupy Nigeria mobilisation drew, by NLC counts, 1.2 million people across all cities at peak — the largest urban mobilisation in Nigerian history.
At least 16 protesters were killed (the most-cited count is the IG of Police's own admission of 11 + at least 5 documented elsewhere). The economic losses to the eight-day shutdown were estimated by NESG at roughly $4.5 billion.
## The reversal mechanism
On 16 January 2012 Jonathan announced via a televised national broadcast that the pump price would be reset to ₦97 — a partial rollback. The NLC and TUC suspended the strike that night. The Nuhu Ribadu-led Special Task Force on Petroleum Revenue, set up later that year, reported that ₦1.07 trillion had been paid in petrol subsidies in 2011 for petrol that, by NNPC's own import records, had never been delivered. No prosecution followed.
## What stayed reversed and what didn't
The pump price stayed at ₦97 until Buhari's May 2016 hike to ₦145. The subsidy regime stayed in place. The deeper political-economy reversal was different: Occupy Nigeria broke Jonathan's mandate. He won the 2011 election with 22 million votes and was widely seen, after January 2012, as a one-term president. The 2015 loss was prefigured by the Ojota occupation. See Bring Back Our Girls and Patterns of Violence.