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

There was this article in one national newspaper in 2016 about falling naira value taking a toll on shopping. It recalled with nostalgia how in 1984, a bachelor living in Lagos’s Maza-Maza suburb could buy a tin of garri for ₦9, an “olodo” of beans for ₦5, a bottle of oil for ₦2.20, a packet of sugar for 50 kobo, and complete a week’s shopping, including fish, bread, pepper, and transport, for roughly ₦26.20.

Minimum wage then stood at about ₦125 a month. The naira still commanded respect; one dollar exchanged for less than ₦1. That modest list has become a quiet national parable of eroded purchasing power. Those who lived it wonder what went wrong while those who did not hear such accounts like a fairytale.

But long before that shopping list, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti had already named the condition. In his 1976 track Yellow Fever, he listed the fevers afflicting the nation including malaria, jaundice, influenza and then “Inflation fever nko? (He dey!)”.

In that song, the Afrobeat legend treated rising prices as a chronic national ailment, one Nigeria has battled, with varying intensity, for generations.

Four decades after the 1984 shopping list, Nigeria confronts another sharp episode of price adjustment. President Bola Tinubu’s administration removed the fuel subsidy in May 2023 and unified the multiple exchange-rate windows, effectively floating the naira in his infamous “subsidy is gone” inauguration speech.

Petrol prices rose several-fold in immediate response to the declaration. Official and parallel rates converged at much weaker levels. Headline inflation, already elevated near 22 per cent in early 2023, climbed to a peak of 34.8 per cent by December 2024 on the old Consumer Price Index (CPI) series.

Food inflation approached or exceeded 40 per cent 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. Real incomes for many households contracted sharply in the interim.

These were not obscure technical measures. They addressed long-standing fiscal drains and distortions. Subsidy payments that had ballooned into trillions of naira annually, often accompanied by allegations of opacity and elite capture, and a multiple-window forex system that created large arbitrage opportunities while starving productive sectors of transparent access to dollars.

With the government of the day facing all forms of criticism from the “negative” impact of these policies, it also arrived with a political pedigree that invites a direct question, and the question is, was their adoption not itself a form of national consensus?

In the 2023 presidential election, eighteen candidates contested. They included 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 remaining candidates 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 three who finished first, second and third, Tinubu (APC, 36.61 per cent with 8.79 million votes), Atiku Abubakar (PDP, 29.07 per cent with 6.98 million votes) and Peter Obi (Labour Party (LP), 25.40 per cent with 6.10 million votes), had all campaigned on versions of the same core reforms.

Tinubu’s manifesto spoke of phasing out the fuel subsidy while protecting the social contract and redirecting savings. Atiku called for an immediate review of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) subsidy spending to free fiscal resources and for eliminating interventionist exchange-rate distortions.

Obi on his part pledged to simplify the exchange-rate regime, end the multiple-window system that subsidised the privileged, and reduce reliance on imported refined products through domestic refining incentives, effectively ending the subsidy regime. Together these three candidates received roughly 91 per cent of the valid votes cast.

Candidates who took clearer contrary positions, notably Omoyele Sowore of the AAC, who argued against removing the subsidy and insisted the real problem was elite fraud in the system and, to a significant degree, Rabiu Kwankwaso of the NNPP, who finished fourth with 6.23 per cent, received far smaller shares.

Taking a closer look and going by the values presented, the electorate, by the arithmetic of the official results, largely passed over Kwankwaso and Sowore.

None of this erases the hardship that followed. Transport costs, food prices and the cost of living rose rapidly. Many households experienced genuine distress. Supporters of the reforms argue that the previous system was fiscally unsustainable, that subsidy funds were poorly targeted, that a more market-reflective exchange rate was required to attract investment and end chronic scarcity, and that the short-term pain is the necessary price of longer-term correction.

Critics now counter that the timing, sequencing and absence of adequate compensatory measures amplified the shock, that inflation and poverty deepened, and that the benefits of higher government revenues and improved reserves have yet to translate sufficiently into broad-based relief.

The data record both the pre-reform distortions and the post-reform adjustment. The electoral arithmetic records that the candidates who openly endorsed the direction of these policies secured the overwhelming majority of votes.

So, whether that constitutes a durable national consensus and whether the subsequent implementation has justified the electoral choice is a judgement each reader must form for themselves. Before we vilify the reforms, perhaps we should first ask ourselves the more critical question: did we not vote for them?

Economic Confidential is a magazine published and produced by Image Merchant Promotion (IMPR) Limited, an Abuja-based Public Relations (PR) outfit with specialty in Media Relations, Crisis Communication, Social Media, Publishing, and Integrated Marketing Communication.