By Abidemi Adebamiwa
Watching a mechanic fix my car the other day reminded me how a nation can collapse under the weight of its own impatience. Before replacing a part, he lifted the car with a hydraulic jack, but he didn’t pull it away immediately. He slid a jack stand beneath the frame to hold the weight steady. Only after that did he remove the hydraulic jack.
If he had skipped that step, the car would have crashed.
That simple act of patience captures what went wrong with Tinubunomics — President Bola Tinubu’s bold but shaky economic direction. The government lifted the economy suddenly with a big policy change but failed to set any support in place. Removing fuel subsidy without creating stabilizers was like pulling away the hydraulic jack before placing the jack stand. The car lifted — but the country fell.
A Policy Of Speed Without Support
For decades, fuel subsidy was both a lifeline and a burden. On paper, ending it made sense. It drained public funds and encouraged corruption. But policymaking is not just about logic — it’s about timing and structure.
The economy needed functioning refineries, efficient transport systems, and safety nets for low-income families before subsidy could go. None of these were ready. Tinubunomics moved fast, skipped the groundwork, and treated a complex economic operation like a roadside repair. The result was chaos.
The Economic Ripple
When fuel prices jumped from around two hundred to more than six hundred naira per litre, everything else followed. A trader who once spent nineteen thousand naira a month on fuel now spends about sixty-five thousand. A small business that used five hundred litres monthly saw its fuel cost rise from ninety-five thousand to over three hundred thousand.
This is a textbook case of cost-push inflation — when production and transport costs rise, driving up prices everywhere. The economy staggers under its own weight. People spend more, buy less, and lose faith. The lift happened, but there was no stand to hold it.
Tinubunomics And The Human Cost
Government promised that the savings from subsidy removal would fund infrastructure and welfare. Yet, months later, many Nigerians saw little change. Palliatives were unevenly shared, and wages remained the same while food prices doubled.
Economics is about people, not just numbers. When citizens stop believing, they adjust their behavior to survive. Traders hike prices early, landlords demand more rent, and inflation races ahead. Tinubunomics ignored this reality. It asked people for patience while leaving them with nothing to hold onto.
Former US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke once said statistics are not just numbers but people’s lives. Aggregate data may show growth, he noted, but behind every figure are families trying to survive. The same truth applies here. A reform that forgets the faces behind the figures has already failed.
The Subsidy Story We Often Ignore
Fuel subsidy itself was never the problem. It began in the 1970s as a safety net — a way to protect Nigerians from global oil price shocks. The principle was sound: if a country produces oil, its citizens should not suffer to buy fuel.
The abuse came later. Ghost importers claimed payments for fuel that never arrived. Records were inflated. Oversight failed. But instead of cleaning the system, successive governments found it politically easier to vilify the policy than to fix the corruption around it.
Making subsidies look bad has long been a political stunt. It’s easier to call the policy wasteful than to admit officials let it be plundered. The real issue was never subsidy — it was greed, impunity, and lack of oversight. A good policy was turned into a scandal by bad actors, and yet those responsible walk free while ordinary citizens pay the price.
It is not reform when the innocent pay for the sins of the powerful.
Those who looted the system are not the ones trekking long distances or shutting their shops early because of high fuel costs. They still travel in convoys and wait for the next loophole to exploit. True reform should have started with justice — fixing the leak before turning off the tap.
The Illusion of Fiscal Courage
President Tinubu has been praised for his “political will.” But courage without calculation is not reform. Real courage is making change without breaking your people.
Countries like Indonesia and Egypt restructured their subsidies carefully. They raised wages, improved public transport, and offered cash support before full removal. Nigeria, however, jumped without a safety net. The decision looked bold, but it was reckless in execution.
The Lesson For Policymakers
Economic recovery is not a race; it’s a sequence. To rebuild trust and growth, Nigeria must repair what it ignored — refineries, transport, fair wages, and transparency. Tinubunomics tried to lift the economy, but without a stand to hold it steady, the weight of hardship fell on ordinary Nigerians.
A mechanic would never remove the hydraulic jack before securing the jack stand. Those who lift a nation’s economy should do the same.
Verified Information
Convictions have been secured in several prominent Nigerian fuel-subsidy fraud cases, though many remain unresolved more than a decade after initial investigations exposed the scale of corruption.
Noteworthy Convictions
Walter Wagbatsoma and Ada Ugo-Ngadi: Co-owners of Ontario Oil and Gas Ltd., convicted on January 26, 2017, by Justice Latifat Okunnu of the Lagos High Court on eight counts of ₦754 million subsidy fraud and sentenced to ten years imprisonment. Wagbatsoma was sentenced in absentia while serving a term in the UK for a separate fraud case.
Jubril Rowaye (Brila Energy): Convicted April 7, 2017, by Justice Adebukola Banjoko for fraudulently obtaining ₦963.7 million under the Petroleum Support Fund and later sentenced by an FCT court to an additional ten years for a separate ₦1.05 billion fraud, to run concurrently.
Mamman Nasir Ali and Christian Taylor: After a 13-year trial, Justice Mojisola Dada of the Special Offences Court, Ikeja, on May 27, 2025, sentenced both men to fourteen years each for ₦2.2 billion subsidy fraud. Two co-accused — Oluwaseun Ogunbambo and Olabisi Abdul-Afeez — remain at large.
Farouk Lawan: Former chair of the House of Representatives ad-hoc committee on the 2012 subsidy probe. He was convicted of receiving a $500,000 bribe from oil tycoon Femi Otedola; the Supreme Court upheld his five-year sentence in January 2024, and he completed his term later that year.
Broader Investigations And Unresolved Issues
The 2012 Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede Presidential Committee identified 21 firms that filed fraudulent subsidy claims and recommended refunds totaling about ₦382 billion. Businessman Femi Otedola renewed public calls in October 2025 for the Tinubu administration to publish the full report, which has never been officially released.
Former EFCC Chairman Abdulrasheed Bawa, in his 2025 memoir, acknowledged that only a fraction of the stolen funds has been recovered and that some law-enforcement personnel were complicit. He confirmed a mix of prosecutions, negotiated recoveries, and stalled cases.
The continuing absence of many indicted marketers, the survival of politically connected firms, and the limited restitution underscore that accountability remains uneven. Despite a handful of successful convictions, Nigeria’s broader fuel-subsidy corruption network has yet to face full justice — an imbalance aptly described as “how narrow justice has been.”
Abidemi Adebamiwa
Abidemi is a policy analyst and Managing Editor @ Newspot Nigeria.