By Oyo State Governor and African People’s Movement presidential candidate Seyi Makinde has weighed in on the ongoing petrol subsidy argument with an unusual take, insisting that Nigerians and policymakers alike have been asking the wrong question all along.
Makinde laid out his position in the September edition of his newsletter, The Business of Governance, published on Friday. Rather than treating the discussion as a binary choice between restoring or maintaining the removal of the fuel subsidy, he argued the country’s real task is to figure out what a genuinely appropriate pricing framework would look like for an oil-producing nation like Nigeria. His broader point was that ordinary Nigerians deserve full clarity on exactly what factors go into setting the pump price they pay.
According to him, a proper pricing framework would need to openly disclose several things that currently remain murky to the public, among them the crude oil price benchmark being used, refining costs and margins, the exchange-rate assumptions built into the calculation, logistics and distribution expenses, and the various taxes and levies layered on top.
Pushing Back on the Smuggling Argument
The governor also took direct aim at a common justification offered for keeping petrol prices elevated, the idea that higher domestic prices are necessary to close the profit gap that fuels smuggling into neighbouring countries. He rejected that reasoning outright, arguing that ordinary Nigerians should not be made to shoulder higher costs simply because the government has struggled to secure its own borders.
Reframing What the Real Question Should Be
Tying his argument together, Makinde said the debate needs to shift away from the simple subsidy-or-no-subsidy framing and toward a more fundamental question, whether the pricing system currently in use actually allows Nigerians to derive a fair benefit from a resource that belongs to them in the first place.
He did not stop at critique alone. Makinde said he intends to put forward an alternative petroleum pricing framework in the coming weeks, giving Nigerians something concrete to evaluate rather than leaving the conversation at abstract disagreement.
