From Midnight Kegs to Market Stability: A Personal Testament to Subsidy Reforms, by Dr. Bunmi Awoyemi

There was a time in Nigeria when the simple act of buying petrol was an ordeal, a trial of patience and a test of human dignity. I do not recount this from newspapers or second-hand accounts, but from the very marrow of my own lived experience.

In those subsidy-soaked years, I was forced to construct a shadow network of filling station managers and owners. With hushed phone calls and coded promises, I would be tipped off: “Come between 2am and 4am.” And so, like a nocturnal pilgrim, I would load 15 to 20 jerrycans into my car and creep through the city under cover of darkness to secure what should have been my lawful right—fuel at the official pump price.

Those less fortunate joined the serpentine queues at dawn, waiting from 5am to 5pm, only to be met with that heart-crushing refrain: “Fuel don finish.” The indignity was multiplied by the decision of fuel stations to sometimes refuse to sell into jerry cans, with most compelling people to bring in their generators to the fuel station. Because of the weight of the generators and the extortionate costs of transporting them to the fuel stations, many consumers became emergency generator mechanics and obtained tools to disconnect the fuel tanks of the generators from the generator to make it easy to transport them to the fuel stations. In the pre-Tinubu subsidy racket era it was common to see people on the queue with generator fuel tanks.

For many others at the bottom rung of the survival of the fittest race, the only option was the black market, where four litres could be extorted for as much as N15,000. This was not governance; it was extortion by design, scarcity weaponised to fatten a subsidy cartel while Nigerians suffered indignity and despair.

But all of that belongs to a dark chapter now firmly closed. Since President Bola Ahmed Tinubu abolished the ruinous subsidy payments, the theatre of scarcity has collapsed. Fuel queues have vanished. Nigerians now enter filling stations in broad daylight, pay at the pump, and drive away without humiliation.

And here lies the economic vindication: with the destruction of the subsidy racket that once allowed over one-third of our imported fuel to be smuggled into neighboring West African countries, the true face of Nigeria’s fuel consumption has emerged. The Presidency’s simultaneous push for compressed natural gas (CNG) adoption by commercial transporters, coupled with Nigerians’ embrace of solar power, improved national grid supply, and LPG-powered generators, has produced a staggering 28% reduction in petrol consumption, as reported by Vanguard.

I can attest to this transformation from my own household. On April 26th, 2025, I refilled my 50kg LPG cylinder for N50,000. Today, as I write on September 5th, 2025, more than four months and ten days later, that same cylinder is still running. I have used my LPG-powered generator for 38 hours since that refill, with 12 hours of power supply still left. My generator burns at the rate of 1kg per hour, and yet, because of improved grid supply and my solar panels, I have barely touched it. This is not anecdote alone; it is living proof of a system finally rebalanced by courageous reform.

Let it be said without equivocation: the subsidy regime was not a pro-poor policy; it was an elaborate racket of organised theft, draining trillions of naira from the treasury, manufacturing scarcity, and enriching a few while humiliating the many. Tinubu’s reform was not merely an economic decision; it was an act of emancipation.

I once prowled at midnight with jerrycans in my boot, a victim of corruption’s cruel choreography. Today, I walk into a station at noon with nothing but my car key. That, my fellow Nigerians, is what courage in leadership looks like.

History will record that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was the man who did not flinch, who broke the spine of Nigeria’s most malignant racket, and in doing so, liberated not just the treasury but the people themselves.

Dr. Bunmi Awoyemi is a Real Estate Developer and Builder.