The 30-day “cheaper fuel” announcement is not a return of subsidy. It is a margin discount, and it does not undo the shock of May 2023.
Treating it as rescue, or treating a full subsidy comeback as rescue, both miss what the last three years have actually shown.
On 8 October 2026 the Minister of Finance, Taiwo Oyedele, set out ten cushioning measures. The headline item is that NNPC Retail will forgo its retail profit margin for 30 days and sell at landing cost, with priority for public transporters.
The Presidency and the minister have both said this is not a subsidy: no Federation Account money is being used to underwrite the pump price; the cut is taken from NNPC’s own retail margin. A landing cost of about ₦1,300 would therefore be sold at about ₦1,300. Alongside that, government is negotiating a ₦1,350 ceiling on ex-gantry or landing cost, to be reviewed monthly, with refiners and importers absorbing any shortfall and recovering it later when crude or the exchange rate eases.
Current NNPC pump prices sit around ₦1,355 in Lagos and Rivers and ₦1,370 in Abuja, after a climb from roughly ₦830 before the latest global spike.
Oyedele’s own arithmetic is that restoring petrol to its pre-reform price would cost more than ₦20 trillion a year at about 50 million litres a day, before smuggling and inflated volumes.
That is the announcement. The politics around it are older.
The 2015 parallel holds. APC’s message then was that subsidy was a scam and that the task was to remove corruption, not the subsidy.
Voters heard relief. What followed under Buhari was the opposite of clean removal: the subsidy bill stayed, volumes were disputed, NNPC under-remitted, and the fiscal hole widened until Tinubu ended the regime on inauguration day.
The slogan was useful for winning. The institutional clean-up was not done. Anyone now promising “return subsidy” in the same register — simple, moral, immediate — is running the same campaign technique.
Atiku Abubakar, the ADC candidate, has been explicit: he will restore subsidy, framed as support for domestic refining rather than the old import racket.
The ADC campaign has already called the 30-day discount a one-month bribe.
Several of the faces in that orbit were in the room, or near it, when the 2015 argument was made.
Party labels have rotated; the incentive to tell people the price they want to hear has not.
The planning critique is also fair, and it does not require conspiracy. Subsidy removal and naira float were dropped on the same economy with thin buffers.
Cash transfers were late and narrow. Refining capacity, even with Dangote online, has not produced a stable domestic price.
Pump prices have jerked with crude, freight, the exchange rate and depot competition.
A 30-day margin waiver plus a negotiated ceiling, announced while a re-election calendar is already visible, looks like management by successive patches.
Government can insist the ceiling is “price smoothing, not subsidy.” Households experience it as another temporary number. When fares rise, they rarely fall as fast as the depot price. That lag is already visible in transport.
Two claims need separating from the anger.
Fuel is more available than in the queue years. That is real. It is also incomplete. Part of the calm at stations is demand destruction: many owners have cut trips, shifted to pooling, or parked vehicles because ₦1,350–₦1,400 a litre against stagnant incomes is a rationing device.
Availability is not the same thing as restored purchasing power. The suffering is not invented.
The old subsidy was also not the social programme it was sold as. A large share leaked through smuggling, ghost volumes and rent. Ending it did move money: government figures put ₦15.8 trillion into the Federation Account between June 2023 and December 2025, with ₦10.4 trillion to states and local governments, and fewer states unable to pay salaries.
That revenue is why a blanket return is not a free lunch. It is a transfer from schools, salaries and debt service back into a leaky price gap, at a moment when Brent and freight can still spike.
Oyedele’s warning that a renewed subsidy could push the naira toward ₦3,000 and the “subsidised” litre toward ₦2,000 is political, but the direction of the arithmetic is not fantasy.
What is missing is not another slogan. It is a published, auditable rule for domestic supply: how much of local refining is reserved, at what transparent netback, with which transport support for the corridors that actually move people, and with the ceiling’s shortfall account opened to scrutiny every month.
A 30-day NNPC discount does not do that. A campaign promise to “bring subsidy back” does not do that either. Both treat a structural price as a mood that can be switched for votes.
Nigerians have already paid the adjustment cost in transport, food and closed shops.
They are owed competence, not a second round of the 2015 script from whichever platform is currently out of power. The test of the next twelve months is whether the ceiling and the local-supply deals are real and published, or whether they expire into the next price spike and the next promise.
After three years, the Tinubu government still looks like a man stumbling through a dark room: groping, colliding with walls, and calling every collision a policy. The reforms have been announced, reversed, reannounced, and blamed on everyone but the people who designed them. What remains is not a clear direction but a pattern of trial and error, while a country that once called itself the giant of Africa sits deeper in the ditch.
The case for a second term is therefore hard to make on the record so far. A leadership that has struggled to steady the currency, the cost of living, and basic public trust cannot simply ask for more time on the promise that the next four years will be different. Nigerians are not short of patience because they are impatient; they are short of patience because the pain has been real, prolonged, and poorly explained.
What the country needs now is not another season of stumbling in search of an exit. It needs a government that can name the ditch, admit how it got there, and show a credible way out.
Rescue and restoration will not come from more improvisation. They will come only when leadership stops treating confusion as strategy and starts treating the suffering of ordinary Nigerians as the measure that matters.
-Pamela O.
Daily Buzzwire.
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