How true is the claim that Nigeria is subsidizing PMS consumption in other neighbouring countries? In January 2022, the Minister of Finance, Zainab Ahmed, declared that the daily PMS consumption rate was 65.7 million litres. The NNPC stated that the average daily PMS supply from January to August 2022 was 68 million litres based on truck-out data. But, the daily PMS consumption rate was 44.4 million litres. The difference was never delivered and reflected the padding of PMS consumption data for corrupt purposes. The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Timipre Sylva, argued that PMS smuggling was responsible for the discrepancy in data from different government sources. He stated, “The imported products come to Nigeria, and from there filters out of our borders to neighbouring countries. We are inadvertently subsidizing the whole of Africa.”

This IMF smuggling argument is premised on the price differential between PMS prices in Nigeria and neighbouring nations. The PMS price per litre in Nigeria is $0.573 while the prices in the neighbouring countries of Benin, Niger, Chad and Cameroon are $1.093, $0.976, $0.847 and $1.093 respectively. However, the area covered by Benin, Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon is not a free market zone where product supply react seamlessly with price stimuli. These are nations with market boundaries that constitute impediment to unrestricted price induced PMS volume flows. During the 2023 Presidential campaign, the Presidential Candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Tinubu, stated ““How can we be subsidizing fuel consumption of Cameroon, of Niger, of Benin Republic. No matter how long you protest, we are going to remove subsidy”. However, in 2023, the Ministry of Petroleum Resources, signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Niger Republic for the importation of petroleum products.  There is obvious no smuggling of Nigerian PMS into Niger.

In September 2022, the Nigeria Customs Service questioned the PMS smuggling assumptions of the NNPCL and government. The NNPCL had claimed it loaded 98 million litres per day in trucks to meet the nation’s estimated 60 million daily PMS consumption needs. The Customs comptroller-general, Hameed Ali, asked “The issue of smuggling, if you release 98 million litres in actuality and 60 million litres are used, the balance should be 38 million litres. How many trucks will carry 38 million litres every day?”. Since it will require 1151 PMS tankers with 33,000 litres capacity crossing the borders daily, the smuggling argument broke down. A simple input output volume balance of petroleum products in the region shows that no PMS is smuggled into neighbouring countries. For example, Niger’s Zinder refinery has a 20,000 barrels per day (bpd) capacity. In 2015, Niger produced 15,280 bpd of petroleum products and imported 3,799 bpd for an input volume of 19,079 bpd. The country consumed 13,000 bpd and exported 5,422 bpd into Chad and Benin for an output volume of 18,422 bpd. Therefore, Niger had a net input of 657 bpd. Chad produced 0 bpd of petroleum products and imported 2,285 bpd for an input volume of 2,285 bpd. It consumed 2,200 bpd and exported 0 bpd for an output volume of 2,200 bpd. It had a net output of 85 bpd.

Cameroon produced 39,080 bpd of petroleum products and imported 14,090 bpd for an input volume of 53,170 bpd. It consumed 42,000 bpd and exported 8,545 bpd for an output volume of 50,445 bpd. It had a net input of 2,725 bpd. Benin produced 0 bpd of petroleum products and imported 38,040 bpd for an input volume of 38,040 bpd. It consumed 44,000 bpd and exported 1,514 bpd for an output volume of 45,514 bpd. It had a net output of 7,474 bpd. The total net output of surrounding nations in the region was 4,177 bpd. In 2015, Nigeria produced 35,010 bpd of petroleum products and imported 223,400 bpd for an input volume of 258,410 bpd. It consumed 316,000 bpd and exported 2,332 bpd for an output volume of 318,332 bpd.  It had a net output of 59,922 bpd. Let us assume that the net regional output of 4,177 bpd from neighbouring countries was smuggled from Nigeria, there would still have been was a net output of 55,745 bpd which was never imported into Nigeria nor smuggled to neighbouring countries.

We have shown that no PMS is smuggled to neighbouring nations. This is an IMF argument to justify the corruption in the subsidy regime. In 2011, the average daily PMS consumption rate was 31.2 million litres, while the government paid fuel subsidy of 2,110 billion Naira on based on  an estimated PMS consumption rate of 56.9 million litres. The difference of 25.7 million litres per day was said to have been smuggled out of the country. In reality, this difference was due to companies making false subsidy claims on undelivered fuel. These corrupt practices were revealed by the 2012 Farouk Lawan House of Representative Ad-Hoc Committee investigation and report. The committee found payments for billions of litres of petrol that were never supplied, and more than $6.8 billion refunds due to the Treasury. The Federal government’s Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede committee also indicted 25 companies. It identified an over payment of $2.5 billion and questioned an additional $1.5 billion worth of transactions. In 2012,  1,360 billion Naira was paid as subsidy for the importation of 43.1 million litres of PMS per day. But, the daily PMS consumption rate was 32.4 million litres. The remaining 10.7 million litres per day of PMS was never delivered. Nobody have gone to jail for this theft of public funds. PMS daily consumption rate should be measured with certified dynamic flow meters such Coriolis meters and a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system to eliminate the falsification or padding of PMS daily consumption data for corrupt purposes. If existing refineries are repaired and more refineries built, there will be no need for a PMS price hike under the guise of fuel subsidy removal.

AS an undergraduate in Great Ife, the Obafemi Awolowo University, I was a member of the Students Representative Council, the parliament. Whenever we met, the generality of the student body surrounded the venue to observe. The idea was that the parliament represented the students, so they have a right not only to observe, but also influence it. In a far limited sense, that is what is called the gallery; except that while the gallery can be cleared, same does not apply to the parliament.

The idea that parliamentarians are autonomous and should not be influenced either in picking their officers or legislating, was ridiculous.

Given that background and consciousness, I find it a huge joke for some legislators-elect to demand that the leadership of the 10th National Assembly should be determined by members alone without influence from outside, including, the ruling party and the President-elect.

It is wishful thinking to expect the in-coming Executive to be disinterested in who becomes the Senate President, Speaker or their Deputies. Even the legislators diverting the country’s attention on such a matter know they are joking. Otherwise, they would not be littering our cities with their billboards and posters soliciting to be elected into the leadership of the National Assembly when they know the general populace, being neither Distinguished Senators nor Honourable Members, are not eligible to vote in the hallowed chambers.

I have not read about these legislators or their horde of supporters making a case for pro-people programmes the next Assembly should pursue; how to check the financial recklessness of previous assemblies, or the content of the character of those aspiring to lead the Assembly. It is all about zoning, sharing offices, and by extension, cornering the resources of the country.

Some even warn that the scenario of the 8th Assembly when Senator Bukola Saraki broke ranks and got himself elected against the position of the party, should not be repeated. I ask: why not? Was the rebel Saraki leadership not far better than the out-going rubber stamp Assembly leadership?

The idea that only National Assembly members should determine who the Senate President or House Speaker should be is as ridiculous as saying politics should be left to politicians alone. Even when the Constitution empowers the President to pick ministers, he cannot be allowed to do so without pressures and interference from various groups, parties, communities and interests, including the National Assembly. Indeed, it will be ridiculous to expect one man alone to pick a minimum of one minister from each of the 36 states without outside interference.

Even if we all close our eyes and play deaf to the process of NASS members electing officers, that would not mean the Assembly will be independent; a parliamentary leadership that wants to sell out will do so irrespective of whether its ascension was backed or rejected by ‘outsiders’. In any case, the idea of whether the NASS is independent or not would not be determined by its antagonism to the Executive.

The fact is that the way the NASS runs is so compromised that it cannot be independent of the Executive. First, it pays its members all sorts of allowances and emoluments, outside what is officially approved. And that is to the extent that the net payment to a member of the House of Representatives comes to some N10 million ($21,621) monthly and that of the Senator, N14 million ($32,272) monthly.

Secondly, the Assembly pads the National Budget so heavily that President Muhammadu Buhari in his 2022 Budget claimed that the NASS inserted 6,576 new projects in the budget, including over 1,500 into the budget of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture alone. These insertions are done without regard to needs, feasibility studies, conceptualisation, design, costing or availability of funds. This, as we are aware, is an annual ritual in the NASS.

Thirdly, the parliamentarians hijack executive responsibilities by awarding themselves ‘constituency projects’ which they cost, award, implement, supervise and approve by themselves.

Perhaps a more fundamental issue is the electoral process that produced many of the NASS members which we all know cannot stand the most basic of scrutiny. Some were not even candidates produced through normal party primaries; and for many, their elections were characterised by financial inducement, blatant vote-buying, intimidation and violence. In summary, the process which produced some NASS members was criminal.

For many legislators, investing huge sums in getting elected into parliament is a worthy investment because the returns are very high; perhaps the highest and safest investment in the country.

So, what we truly need in Nigeria is not the so-called independence of the legislator from the Executive, but his independence from an un-parliamentary culture. A critical step is to make it so unattractive that only those interested in serving the people will seek election into parliament. I am never tired of making a contrast between the Nigerian Senator who for the work of making laws collects an obscene net of $32,272 monthly or $387,264 annually, and his Cuban counterpart who receives not a single cent for doing the same work. While the Nigerian Senator claims to be doing legislative work full-time and lays claims to other monies, including for vehicles, the Cuban Senator has a full-time work and being a legislator is part-time. So in Cuba, after a normal day’s work, while his fellow workers are going home to their families or for relaxation, the Senator is heading to the National Assembly for the voluntary part-time work of making laws. Therefore, where in Nigeria a Senator may be willing to buy votes, employ thugs and violence in order to get elected or re-elected, the Cuban Senator does not buy votes, and may not even be too keen to get elected. Yet, the quality of law making in Cuba, is not inferior to that in Nigeria. If anything, going by the pro-people laws in Cuba, the Cuban National Assembly is far superior to that of Nigeria.

This is not about a socialist or non-socialist system, it is about basic human decency. For instance, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, the two-term President of Iran who left office in August 2013, did not retire into stupendous wealth like former Nigerian Presidents. He merely returned to his work as a lecturer in the Civil Engineering Faculty of the Iran University of Science and Technology.

When he returned to his teaching job after a ten-year absence, he told his colleagues and students: “I am very happy to be back, as if I am home.”

Again, unlike former Nigerian Presidents and state governors who have convoys of expensive cars, including bullet proof ones, Ahmadinejad has been seen going to work in crowded buses. He has no fear of being mobbed because he was and remains part of the Iranian people.

On August 17, 1980, the 6th Commonwealth Law Conference convened in Lagos, then capital of Nigeria. After the arrival courtesies were dispensed with, it fell upon Shehu Shagari, civilian president of Nigeria then in office for 10 and a half months, to declare the conference open. The keynote speaker was Jeremiah Obafemi Awolowo, Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and leader of the opposition Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN), who had run President Shagari desperately close in the contest for Nigeria’s presidency only one year before.

That contest ended up being decided by the Supreme Court of Nigeria in a judgment memorably described as being “a compromise between law and political expediency”. At the head of the bench that decided the case was Atanda Fatayi-Williams, at the time the Chief Justice of Nigeria. As famous as this judgment would become, the antecedents arguably proved to be more lasting in their influence on Nigeria’s politics and institutions.

The relevant part of the story begins on August 16, 1979, when the Federal Electoral Commission, (FEDECO) headed by Michael Ani, announced Shehu Shagari of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) as the winning candidate in the elections to return Nigeria to civil rule. Three of the five presidential candidates in the contest repudiated the result, setting up what would become an epic election dispute. Obafemi was one of the three.

The Electoral Act of 1979 under which the vote took place anticipated that there could be a dispute and conferred on the Supreme Court the jurisdiction for final decision-making on disputes concerning the presidential election. The panel to hear the disputes were to be led by the Chief Justice of Nigeria but the then incumbent, Sir Darnley Alexander, was due to retire on August 24, 1979, a mere eight days after the announcement of the result and well before the Supreme Court was due to begin hearing the presidential election dispute.

Three days before the retirement date of Chief Justice Darnley Alexander, on August 21, 1979, then military Head of State, Olusegun Obasanjo, an army general, requested to meet Atanda Fatayi-Williams, then a Justice of the Supreme Court, at the seat of power in the Dodan Barracks in Lagos. At the meeting, Obasanjo offered Fatayi-Williams the office of Chief Justice in succession to Sir Darnley.

In his memoirs, ‘Faces, Cases, and Places’ published in 1983, Fatayi-Williams claimed that this offer “was totally unexpected, and, for the first time in my life, I was at a loss for words”, adding that Obasanjo “watched my discomfiture with relish and delight”.

Some of his peers on the Supreme Court were not so sure. Fatayi-Williams was admitted to the Bar of the Middle Temple in London in 1948, one year after Chukwunweike Idigbe and three years later than Dr. Egbert Udo Udoma, both of whom were his peers in the Supreme Court. Fatayi-Williams was from Lagos; Idigbe came from the then Mid-West; while Udo Udoma came from the then South Eastern State. Idigbe became a judge in 1961, before being appointed to the Supreme Court in 1964. His service on the Supreme Court was, however, fractured by the Nigerian Civil War.

Udo Udoma, who also became a judge in 1961, had enjoyed a career as a lawyer, minority rights activist, campaigner, politician, and federal legislator before being appointed a judge in 1961. Two years later, in 1963, he became Chief Justice of Uganda with the understanding that upon the end of his tenure in Uganda, he would return to a position on Nigeria’s Supreme Court. This came to pass in 1968 when General Yakubu Gowon appointed him Justice of the Supreme Court. Atanda Fatayi-Williams arrived court in 1969 as a junior to Udo Udoma and, strictly speaking, to Idigbe.

In his memoirs, ‘The Eagle in Flight’, Udo Udoma recalls that upon the retirement of Chief Justice Adetokunbo Ademola in 1972, the then-ruling Supreme Military Council considered five names for appointment to replace him, namely: Professor Taslim Elias, who was then the Attorney-General of the Federation; John Idowu Conrad Taylor, then Chief Justice of Lagos (as the office was then known); Dr. George Baptist Ayodola Coker, Justice of the Supreme Court; Rotimi Frederik Alade Williams, a senior lawyer in private practice; and Udo Udoma himself. Fatayi-Williams was notably not in the running. In the event, the military preferred Taslim Elias, who had served them well as Attorney-General.

When a new military regime relieved Elias of the position in July 1975, they settled on Sir Darnley Alexander, until then a little-known Chief Judge of the South Eastern State, whom Udo Udoma had recommended for that office.
In 1979, the stakes in the appointment of Chief Justice were very high: the presidency of Nigeria could depend on it. Udo Udoma, who lived with medically induced disabilities, writes in his memoirs that: “Justice Fatayi-Williams, then also a Justice of the Supreme Court, registered a solemn protest on the ground that he saw no reason why I (Udo Udoma) should be given such a high post as the Chief Justice of Nigeria despite the fact that I was an amputee. He felt strongly that the SMC under the leadership of a Yoruba man like himself would not be justified to ignore him who then had no handicap. He then contacted several Yoruba men, including Chief S.L. Edu, to contact General Olusegun Obasanjo as Head of State to plead his case.”

Continuing, Udo Udoma records that these “intrigues succeeded and he was preferred to me because, in his representation, he was able to convince General Olusegun Obasanjo that since Alhaji Shehu Shagari as a Hausa-Fulani, was contesting the office of President of Nigeria and had chosen Dr. Ekwueme, an Igbo man, as his running mate as Vice-President, both of whom were likely to win, then the office of Chief Justice of Nigeria ought to be filled by himself, a Yoruba man, especially as Chief Obafemi Awolowo was sure to lose the election.”

Udo Udoma published these lines in 2008, 28 years after Obafemi Awolowo’s keynote to the Commonwealth Law Conference in 1980. In that address, Chief Awolowo alleged that the appointment of Fatayi-Williams to the office of Chief Justice in 1979 came with an implicit bargain concerning the determination of the election petition of that year. He also claimed that days before the Supreme Court announced the decision on 26 September 1979, Chief Justice Atanda Fatayi-Williams leaked the decision of the Court to General Obasanjo who desired to be reassured that he could proceed with the inauguration date of 1 October 1979 as planned.

Nearly all the protagonists involved in this story are no longer alive and their stories are hidden away in books, whose existence most Nigerians do not know about. The only one alive, General Obasanjo, an otherwise prolific author, has not held forth on these issues. The full facts of what transpired may never be known publicly.

In 2008 and in 2019, judges who sat on controversial presidential election petitions in election years enjoyed quick judicial elevation from the parties in whose favour they decided. Also in 2019, a chief justice was sacked ostensibly because he could not be trusted to determine presidential election petitions in a predictable way in the manner that his would-be successor could. What seems clear is that since 1979, judicial appointments and decision-making in election petitions have always enjoyed a relationship underpinned by a whiff of quid pro quo.

Those interested in following the fate of the presidential election petitions whose consideration is ongoing in Abuja, Nigeria’s federal capital, may wish to remember that there are currently only thirteen serving Justices of the Supreme Court, which leaves the court with eight vacancies to be filled by a new government.

Politicians have learned to turn election dispute resolution into auditions for the shifting of judicial deck chairs. First, they rig elections in order to get the opportunity to rig the courts with judges ready to help them to validate rigged elections. That is the legacy of the unspoken antecedents of Awolowo v. Shagari.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.