Tinubu’s ‘subsidy is gone’ declaration fuelled by braggadocio, says Oby Ezekwesili

Oby Ezekwesili, a former minister of education, says the petrol subsidy removal was an important policy that was implemented wrongly. 

Ezekwesili spoke on Monday during the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) 2025 general conference, held in Enugu state.

The former minister said there was no proper preparation for the reform, stressing that President Bola Tinubu’s “subsidy is gone” declaration was fueled by “braggadocio”.

“As rightly said, the subsidy was skewing factors of production for us as an economy,” she said.

“Now realigning those prices was important but guess what? Doing it the wrong way was going to create the kind of distortionary effect that then became the galloping state of inflation that subsequently followed.”

Ezekwesili said the reforms were implemented in a way that “missed the boat”, even though realigning factors of production through proper pricing was necessary.

“The second thing was this matter of the petroleum pricing. What we normally advise because liberalising and getting market pricing of a commodity like that to be appropriate actually does need to happen. Otherwise it skews the economy,” Ezekwesili said.

“But what would normally happen is that you would make sure that you have prepared for that reform. That reform was not prepared for. 

“So what we ended up in that situation was a good reform done in the wrong way and because that good reform was done in the wrong way, it signalised to every other economic type of decisions that citizens had to make and it threw the economy into the inflationary situation that we have found.” 

The economist said the situation was bad because inflation punishes the weakest population of any society. 

“When we train in economic policy, you really have to prepare for reforms. I think that there was a braggadocio that was behind that whole “subsidy is gone”,” Ezekwesili said.

On May 29, President Bola Tinubu said the petrol subsidy regime was over.

Three months later, TheCable reported that Tinubu was considering a “temporary subsidy” on petrol as crude oil prices and foreign exchange (FX) rates soared.

Although the federal government consistently denied the return of petrol subsidy, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited later said the federal government owes it N7.8 trillion for under-recovery.

Nigeria fully exited subsidy payments in October 2024 when the federal government deregulated the downstream sector, with petrol pump price crossing N1,000 at NNPC’s retail outlet, reflecting market prices.