Nigeria’s catastrophic fuel crisis has a straightforward solution

The subsidy has survived for decades, despite several attempts to get rid of it. President Bola Tinubu announced at his inauguration last year that the “fuel subsidy is gone”. Yet it quickly returned. In its current form, it is convoluted and opaque. The state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation swaps locally pumped crude oil for petrol refined abroad, and sells that petrol to Nigerian motorists at a below-market price. The vast losses it makes on this are deducted from the oil revenues it is supposed to pay to the state. This dramatically reduces what is available for public services.