By Kemi Asekun-Shittu
In June 2023, motorbike riders filled the streets of Garoua in northern Cameroon. Thousands of them. Angry.
They were not angry with their own president. They were angry with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
Let that sit for a moment. Foreigners rioting because Nigeria stopped paying for something.
What had we been paying for? Their fuel.
Before subsidy ended, a litre of petrol here cost about 189 naira. Across the border it cost the equivalent of 333 naira in Chad, 365 in Niger, 381 in Benin and 399 in Cameroon.
Now put yourself in the shoes of those rioting young men. Their business, buying cheap fuel in Nigeria and doubling their money on the other side, was destroyed by a single sentence. “Subsidy is gone.”
That trade had thrived for decades. It was handed down from father to son. Our subsidised petrol was found as far away as Sudan.
And let us not lose sight of what it was actually made of. It was Nigeria’s blood. Our life force. Our collective wealth.
We were not subsidising Nigerians. We were running an export business at a loss and calling it a welfare programme.
The day the subsidy stopped, we did not need any expert to explain what had been going on. The neighbours announced it for us.
In Benin, kpayo, the name they give our smuggled roadside fuel, doubled overnight from 350 CFA to 700. Suddenly it cost more than the filling station down the road. The hawkers on the way to Cotonou vanished. One woman told a reporter that in a whole morning only five customers stopped by, because the official pump price was now cheaper than kpayo.
In Garoua the black market price doubled too. Hence the riot.
But the real revelation was felt at home, in the volume of petrol we consumed. Our daily consumption fell from 66.9 million litres to 48.43 million almost immediately.
That figure should be on every wall in this country and in every Nigerian’s mouth.
Did one third of Nigerians sell their cars in one week?
No. It was one third of our subsidised fuel walking across the border every night, while we borrowed money to pay for it.
What did that one third cost us?
Eighteen and a half million litres a day. That is the gap between what we were billed for and what Nigerians actually burned.
In February 2022 the pump price was 185 naira, the landing cost was 315, and NNPC was selling to distributors at 113. The state was carrying about 202 naira on every single litre.
Multiply with me.
18.5 million litres × 202 naira = 3.7 billion naira a day.
26 billion naira a week.
Roughly 1.4 trillion naira a year.
Even if we use the cautious official estimate that 15.6 million litres a day were being smuggled, we are still above one trillion naira a year riding out of Nigeria on motorcycles.
One trillion naira. Every year.
Can Nigeria really afford that, for a welfare programme that enriched only a few?
The leakage was only part of the bill. In 2022 alone, NNPC spent 4.39 trillion naira on petrol subsidy and remitted nothing at all to the federation accounts that year. Nothing. NNPC put the running cost at over 400 billion naira a month.
This wound is old, and we know who inflicted it: 2006 to 2015, under the successive governments of the party in which Alhaji Atiku Abubakar served as Vice President, cost Nigeria 8.94 trillion naira in petrol subsidy alone.
That money had somewhere else to be.
It turned our roads into death traps and our hospitals into waiting mortuaries. It left civil servants on a pittance, and in some states with nothing at all.
They built the scheme. They defended it. They handed it over untouched.
So when Alhaji Atiku Abubakar now says he will bring back subsidy, understand that he is not offering you a new idea. He is offering you a return.
The work of dismantling it began when President Muhammadu Buhari signed the Petroleum Industry Act in August 2021 and finally put the legal framework in place. What remained was the political courage to use it. President Bola Tinubu supplied that on his first day in office, knowing exactly what it would cost
him.
He did it anyway.
Every leak needs two things
A hole, and pressure.
Take away the pressure and the hole is harmless. That is what removing subsidy did. The gap closed, and the pipeline dried up on its own. No soldiers required.
Take away the hole and the pressure has nowhere to go. That is what border control does.
For twenty years we left both wide open, then held meetings about missing revenue.
Now hear the promise
Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, the ADC candidate, stood before a crowd and pledged to reopen Nigeria’s land borders.
Please tell him, they are already open. Not all at once and not carelessly, but corridor by corridor, on assessment, with customs and the security agencies in the room. That is how a serious government does it.
He talked about trade. He talked about young men out of work. Then he explained the policy using his own factory, complaining that his container takes two months to reach Adamawa from Lagos. Had they built light rail during the Obasanjo and Atiku years, perhaps that container would move faster today.
To understand the nature of the man, look at
how he chose to argue a national question. He spoke for himself first.
And in that rather pedestrian argument, look at what he did not say. Nothing on how the crossings would be policed. Nothing on customs capacity. Nothing on rice, on arms, on drugs, on fuel. Nothing about the leak.
Nothing, either, on global oil prices, or on what he intends to do when they swing against a subsidy he has promised to restore.
He simply promised to open the hole, and moved on to the next applause line.
He is not confused. He knows.
This is the part his campaign would rather you did not think about.
Alhaji Atiku spent two decades inside the Nigeria Customs Service. Twenty years. He knows precisely what happens at a border when the price is cheaper on one side. He knows it better than almost anyone alive in Nigerian politics.
So he is not a man who failed to understand the danger. He is a man who understands it perfectly.
Open borders. Efficiency. Trade. Prosperity.
Beautiful, deadly words by a man who puts himself, his cronies and businesses first, spoken by a man who sold Nigeria owned companies for cheap and left the workers with nothing, not even their entitlements. Talk is cheap, but antecedents speak volumes.
What this election is actually about
Nobody in this campaign will insult you by pretending the last three years were gentle. They were hard. Transport, food, school fees. Everybody felt it, and everybody is still feeling parts of it.
But that pain paid for something.
Between June 2023 and December 2025, ending the subsidy put 15.8 trillion naira into the Federation Account. Of that, 10.4 trillion went to the 36 states and the 774 local governments. That is money delivered to the level of government sitting closest to your street, your clinic, your child’s classroom.
It closed a hole that had been draining this
country for a generation. It ended a scheme where Nigerian workers funded fuel for four other countries. It shut down a pipeline that no number of patrol vans had ever managed to shut.
We already paid that bill. It was expensive, and it was ours.
Now a man who ran Customs for twenty years, and who has already presided once over the handing of public wealth into private hands, is asking for the chance to open the door again.
Before you answer him, look at what the last two decades cost us.
One point four trillion naira a year, walking out of this country on a motorcycle.
Then ask him one question, and do not let him
past it.
Who was truly benefiting from the fuel subsidy?
Hajia Kemi Asekun-Shittu is a broadcaster and a Spokesperson of the 2027 Presidential Campaign Council.
