American political scientists John W Spanier and Robert L. Wendzel published a book in 1972, which they called Games Nations Play. In the book, they likened international relations to a game of chess played by various state actors who often disguise their real intentions in each move they make. 

I have adapted John Spanier’s title because I also believe that Nigeria’s ‘oil cabals’ are playing games with Nigerians. The word ‘cabal’ typically is used to designate political intrigues involving persons or entities of some eminence. Following from this, members of the oil cabal in Nigeria are the government, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Ltd, Dangote Refinery and oil marketers. No one really knows who is telling the truth among these entities, which seem to be playing some shenanigans with Nigerians over the pricing of fuel.

 What we can surmise from all their game is that there are obvious personal and institutional interests that need to be protected and probably none of the members of the cabal is telling us the whole truth. Take Dangote for instance. For a long time the belief among Nigerians was that once the Dangote Refinery came on-stream, the pump prices of fuel would fall drastically or at least moderate. For this, when Nigerians felt the government was using the NNPCL to frustrate the Dangote Refinery, they came out in support of the company and its founder, Aliko Dangote. They created a simplistic binary narrative in which Aliko Dangote(the man who successfully built a world-class refinery that the government couldn’t do) was held up as the good guy while the other members of the cabal were projected as the bad guys. However, as fuel prices continued to soar to the high heaves, amid the bickering between the NNPCL, oil marketers and Dangote, many are no longer sure where to put the blame. This is especially so as Dangote has understandably taken a public position that government should not be subsidizing fuel.  Of course government subsidizing fuel – something many Nigerians feel is the right thing to do if the corruption and opacity in the subsidy regime is frontally addressed – would be bad business for him. 

Dangote has also reportedly made moves to get the government to ban the importation of fuel while marketers are reportedly claiming that imported fuel will be cheaper for Nigerians than buying from Dangote. I admire what Dangote has been able to achieve for himself and the country as a businessman. But I can also see why ideologically his feat in building a refinery may make it more difficult for the forces arguing for subsidies to be brought back on the premise that subsidizing fuel would cascade better throughout the entire value chain of the country’s economy than subsidizing any other sector.

In my column of September 9, 2023 titled: ‘Was there really a consensus that fuel subsidy should go?’ I challenged the notion that there was a consensus that fuel subsidy should be removed. I argued that the wrong notion that there was a “consensus” that the subsidy on fuel price should be removed seems to have been amplified by a number of factors: 

One, is the media orchestration of the fact that the three leading candidates in the last presidential election – Tinubu of the APC, Atiku of the PDP and Peter Obi of the Labour Party are all free marketers, who in the course of their campaigns, had said they would remove subsidies on fuel if elected.

Two, is that the constant media repetition of this lie that there was a ‘consensus’ tended to make it acquire the toga of truth – in line with the dictum of Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda for the Nazi government of the Third Reich who infamously was quoted as saying: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it people will eventually come to believe it.” 

Three, many Nigerians were disenchanted by the obvious corruption in the subsidy regime. For instance, a report by the Businessday of May 22, 2023 revealed that Buhari, who had called fuel subsidy a scam as an opposition politician, ended up spending more on fuel subsidy than his three predecessors in the current democratic dispensation combined.

Four, critical voices, essentially from the Lagos axis, who used to be the guiding spirits or quiet funders of anti-government protests, including the protest over the removal of fuel subsidy in January 2012 (aka ‘Shutdown Nigerian’ protest) became quiet or muffled when the APC came to power in 2015 as they became either emotionally aligned to the party or became weakened by that alliance.

I argued that checkmating the fraud in the subsidy regime and gradually reducing the level of the subsidy would have been more productive because maintaining a level of subsidy on PMS and fertilizer will also mean subsidizing food and manufacturing as well as the middle class (who are the most productive segment of the population). I further argue that maintaining a level of subsidy on PMS will cascade throughout the entire value chain of the country and therefore better than trying to narrowly target a particular demographic with handouts (otherwise called palliatives). Besides, I also contended that there was no logic in the government removing subsidy on fuel (where it is most needed) just to be able to create subsidies in other sectors – in a rather very inefficient and unconvincing manner. 

Obviously I do not think anyone who had invested billions of dollars to build a costly refinery as Dangote did would fold his hands for his investment to be ruined through government subsidy of fuel. I believe that a massive subsidy of fuel that would bring the pump price of fuel to less than N300 per litre would be a better and cheaper way of re-invigorating the economy and indirectly supporting our infant industries than whatever we are doing now to cushion the effects of removing fuel subsidy and floating the Naira. Yes, neoliberal economists would tell us the country cannot afford this – the way they had wrongly argued that only the elites were benefitting from fuel subsidy.  But just imagine for a while the impact of fuel costing N300 per litre on the economy!

As an undergraduate student of Political Science in the 1980s, our Marxist lecturers used to recommend that Africa should de-link from the world capitalist system. It did not make much sense to me at that time. However, with the war in Ukraine triggering imported inflation and street protests in several countries around the world, including in Nigeria, Ghana and Egypt, I began to understand better what the globalisation of markets means and what it would mean to de-link from that market or at least tactically engage it.  

The Tinubu government’s removal of fuel subsidies and flotation of the Naira almost at the same time exacerbated the imported inflation from the Russo-Ukraine War and inflicted perhaps the worst hardship in living memory on Nigerians.  Remarkably supporters of the government call these measures “reforms” as if they were different from what Babangida did when his government embraced an IMF/World Bank-supported Structural Adjustment Programme in the 1980s and 1990s. Babangida’s SAP not only emasculated the country’s middle class but also completely ruined the economy. When the SAP failed in every country it was introduced in Africa, the Bretton Woods Institutions changed the mantra from “rolling back the state” to “bringing back the state” – as they moved from market fetishism to glib talks about good governance and building of institutions. 

We have been lectured recently by a World Bank’s economic team  that we need to be on this “reform” path for at least 15 years before we could reap the supposed benefit. Obviously members of the team are unaware of the dictum by the British economist John Maynard Keynes that in the long run we are all dead. Sadly while the neo-liberal economics of the Bretton Woods Institutions could create a handful of people on the Forbes Rich List, it will simultaneously turn over 70 per cent of the population into multi-dimensional poverty.