By Bestman Michael 

For decades, I have grown up to hear so called economic experts and government spokespersons talk about how deregulation and privatisation is the only ways of saving and revamp the economy of a country like Nigeria that has been plagued by the failure of the same capitalists underdevelopment policies. Every new regime have continued with the same sing song rolling out the same gospel of coming and future prosperity for the country, while voraciously continuing the attack on working and living conditions, and by so doing increasing the fold of millions of the population condemned to misery and surviving on little or nothing.

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Take for example the discussion about fuel subsidy, the lie is pandered that like other commodities, fuel must be allowed to find their appropriate market leveling and price that it is a sure medicines to allow the dictates of the market forces to fix our economic leaks. They say that by removing subsidies, the country will naturally correct itself, and usher in an era of abundant flow of milk and honey for the working masses, and foster what again is the rhetoric of a healthy competition. Of course, backed by the IMF and World Bank, it can only be truer (much paradoxically) from whose lens you watch as the country and its working masses suffer the worst of living conditions hitherto unenvisaged.

While I will attempt to cut through the countless jargons about “fiscal balance sheets”, I will confront this question from a rather raw, material point of class struggle: why the fuel price deregulation continues to put millions of working people in abject poverty. 

In 2023, the price of fuel sat between ₦185 and ₦198 per litre. This is against the less, maybe, quoted prices of previous regimes before the Tinubu presidency took over.  In fact, on the day of his inauguration, he announced the removal of fuel subsidy. That singular utterance became the trajectory of several economic crises inherited by the working class. By May 2026, three years under the Tinubu regime, the average pump price of fuel peak between ₦1,100- ₦1,600 per litre or higher in different places. 

In perspective, when the cost of fuel increases by tenfold, it automatically sees a shift in the cost of living, which can never be met by any working-class household. For instance, the cost of transportation goes up, the prices of commodities become extremely expensive to purchase, the quality of life drops, and just like that, the working people are plunged to another round of barbarism and economic deprivation despite being the ones creating such wealth for the economy. 

 Sadly, for a society that has failed to provide electricity or the basic necessities of life, with small scale businesses surviving on having to purchase fuel, it is clear enough where we are in the country especially those in the informal sector. 

Coupled with the fuel subsidy removal, the Tinubu regime also launched other rounds of deadly neo-liberal policies like increase in electricity tariffs, taxing the poor through increase in VAT rates and scrupulously charging for withdrawal of one’s bank account for a figure as low as N10, 000. This resultant effect is a further depleting of the workers’ poor income in the face of a surge in inflation side by side rise in unemployment, insecurity, food insecurity, and other social vices. 

With this, deregulation is only but a policy that benefits only the rich. While rich ruling class might consume more fuel, the proportion of income spent on energy by the working people is incomparably higher. In fact, data reveals quite empirically that by doubling fuel prices, the real consumption of the poorest households is reduced by over 11%, while contracting that of the wealthiest by under 5%. In fact, the national poverty headcount ratio has expanded to a staggering 67.1%. 

If deregulation has driven more than two-thirds of the Nigerian population into economic precarity, it has not done so in a vacuum. Under capitalism, one class’s ruin is the foundation of another’s accumulation: the oppressed vs the oppressors, the exploitation of man by man. 

To show this, our public refineries are in complete jeopardy, not a step in taken to revamp or set machinery in motion to build new ones for the country. The government is rather chooses to consolidate private capital and concentrate market power into the hands of a private monopoly as we’ve seen with the Dangote Refinery and a clique of fuel importers.  By mid-2026, Dangote Refinery has captured over 81% of Nigeria’s domestic petrol market. Yet, this shift did not translate into relief. On July 13, 2026, the refinery officially ended all Naira-denominated transactions for local refined products, pegging the ex-depot price of petrol at $0.779 per litre.

This, again, is the ultimate tragedy of the deregulated market.  Even when petrol is extracted from Nigerian soil and refined on Nigerian land, the Nigerian worker must buy it using the metrics of Wall Street. Meanwhile, the Tinubu regime boasts of the trillions of Naira saved from the elimination of the subsidy. But these “savings” are not being funneled and made available for  public usage and transited to healthcare, or education; they are being swallowed by the insatiable demands of international finance capital, with debt-servicing costs slated to consume an astronomical ₦15.5 trillion in the national budget or as with the typical Nigerian ruling class, embezzled or siphoned with little or no accountability or trace except under political tensions or disagreement in political interests. 

Furthermore, under pressure of chronic fiscal deficits, in a report by Business Day, we see how the state-owned NNPC has mortgaged the nation’s future production through opaque forward-sale agreements, committing approximately 213,000 barrels of crude oil per day (nearly 15% of annual production) directly to foreign creditors.

To keep the anger and frustration of the working class at bay, the ruling class has ventured into palliatives to cushion the economic crises they created. In fact, after #EndSARS protest in 2020, we became aware of storehouses where even these palliatives were hoarded. Even when they are distributed, it is but a theatrics for political support for coming elections or weaponising poverty. 

Let me reiterate here that from a historical perspective, palliatives are not welfare. They are only safety valves designed to de-escalate class tension while leaving the core machinery of exploitation entirely intact. The state robs the working class of ₦100,000 in real purchasing power through fuel price hikes, only to hand back ₦10,000 in a highly publicized charity drive. It is disgraceful. It should never be celebrated. However, the working people have two choices: to bow before the altar of the “free market,” or organize to reclaim the wealth of our soil. And it is here that the latter is only but the alternative we must strive for: a socialist planned economy. 

We must demand the democratic nationalization of the entire energy sector and other commanding sectors like education, health, electricity under workers’ control, placing refining and distribution under public ownership to serve human need rather than private profit. We must abolish “import parity pricing” and ensure that our domestic crude oil is allocated to our local public refineries and priced in the national currency based on the actual cost of production. Again, only by seizing the social surplus and redirecting it into state-planned public transit, industrial agriculture, and decentralized energy grids can we guarantee the liberation, sovereignty, and dignity of the working class. Viva Socialism.