How Multiple Petrol Price Hikes Are Crippling Everyday Life in Nigeria

While reforms that will lead to safer transportation of fuel are important, it is gut-wrenching that such a tragic incident could have been avoided if the country’s overall petrol situation were far better. And although Nigeria has recorded tragedies like this in the past, this incident comes amid a wave of constant petrol price hikes. In the past 17 months since President Bola Tinubu came into office, the price of petrol has skyrocketed (almost 500 percent) and scarcities have become more frequent than ever. It’s a double whammy of expensive and unavailable, an environment that leads to hundreds swarming fallen petrol tankers even though the risk is apparent.

“People are really desperate,” Jimoh, a barber who owns a small salon in Surulere, Lagos Mainland, tells OkayAfrica. “The way the price of fuel [has] jumped, I can’t blame the people that will rush a tanker if it falls. Something we’re buying [at a] high price, you’ll see the tanker and want to risk it because it looks like it’s free.”

Before the recent, frequent price hikes, Jimoh used to have a daily routine: Arrive at his barbershop at around 8 a.m., walk to a nearby filling station to buy petrol if one of the two designated jerry cans was empty, and then fully open for the day. “I always had fuel, even during small fuel scarcity, I will make sure those two jerry cans are filled,” he says, pointing towards the corner of the shop, near the door.

These days, that routine has been upended by the huge increases in petrol prices. Only one of the two 25-liter jerry cans has petrol in it, and it’s barely half full. “Before, even if there was no customer around, I would turn on the generator after one or two hours when [electricity] goes off. I can’t even try that one again,” Jimoh says, adding that previously, he normally ran his generator for three to four hours in the evenings to allow neighbors and friends to charge their devices and appliances for free. This highlights just how dire the situation has become in a country still struggling to provide consistent electricity to over 200 million citizens.

After President Tinubu announced that the “fuel subsidy is gone” during his inauguration speech in May 2023, causing prices to triple, Jimoh bought two rechargeable hair clippers and rechargeable bulbs. Now, he prefers to use those rechargeable appliances when there’s no electricity, and he charges a higher price for clients who come with their own hair clippers that need power from his generator.

When Jimoh, now in his late 20s, first opened his salon in 2019, petrol was selling at ₦145 (about $0.50 then) per liter. The standard price for cutting hair then was ₦500 (about $1.4 then). Now, buying petrol at over ₦1,000 (about $0.61), he charges between ₦1,000 and ₦1,500 (about $0.91) per cut. “The money I make is not even enough to cover me. Everything is now so expensive,” Jimoh says, adding that initially, people thought the increase in the price of the dollar to the naira was causing an increase in the price of all other commodities and services. “But it’s fuel now. The money for transport from my house to my shop alone has gone up many times since last year.”

The increase in the price of petrol is one of several policies that has driven up inflation over the past year-and-a-half. After two months when the inflation rate slowed down, it came back up in September, with analysts pointing at a hike in petrol price as the primary reason. The inflation rate is set to increase in October, as Nigeria’s state oil firm (NNPCL) again hiked the price to almost double earlier this month.

For a country that basically runs on petrol, these hikes, which may continue, are having debilitating effects on the quality of lives and livelihoods of many Nigerians. The deaths of those who swarmed a fallen tanker are on the more gruesome side of the spectrum, but it shows how the cost of living crisis has been exacerbated by the cost of petrol.

Just before Tinubu took office last year, Clarence Momoh moved from Ilorin to the capital city, Abuja, after securing a job at a bank. The then-new job came with a 70 percent increase in her monthly earnings, and she “dreamed of many ways” to spend her new income. “As soon as that fuel subsidy announcement happened, I just knew my money would lose some of its value, but I didn’t expect it to be this bad,” she says.

The way Momoh sees it, her increased earnings haven’t greatly upgraded her life. “The amount I spend on transportation from where I stay to the office has almost tripled,” she says. “Food is more expensive and just going out for anything is a luxury.”

There’s a direct correlation between the cost of petrol — which influences the cost of movement — and the cost of living, which plays a role in how desperate people are to try things like approaching an overturned fuel tanker. For an oil-producing country, the solutions aren’t too complex on paper, but they seem almost impossible in practice due to a lack of will and transparency.

If done, reviewing petrol transportation protocols will help secure lives better, but also – perhaps more important — is a plan that makes petrol far more affordable. So far, it doesn’t seem like a priority for the Tinubu-led administration.