Part Four.

What Would Actually Have to Change

Three parts ago, we started with a simple question.

Nigeria is earning more from oil. So why is Grace buying rice in cups?

By now you know the answer is not simple. You know the number she hears on the news is not the number that matters. You know the dollar survives a five-room journey before it reaches the reserve figure, and loses something in every room. You know that what survives that journey already has four creditors waiting for it. Debt. Fuel imports. Currency defence. Elections.

You also know something harder. That the system producing this outcome was not assembled by accident. It has beneficiaries. It has lawyers. It has an Act of Parliament behind it. And it has been producing this outcome, in one form or another, across every administration Nigeria has had since oil became the centre of the economy.

So this is the part where most analyses would say: here is what Nigeria needs to do. Diversify. Improve transparency. Fight corruption. Build institutions. Strengthen the naira.

This piece will not do that.

Not because those things are wrong. Because they describe destinations without describing the terrain between here and there. And the terrain is the story. The terrain is why the series exists.

Start with the most honest statement about reform this series can make.

Every structural problem described in Parts One through Three has been identified before. By Nigerian economists. By the IMF. By the World Bank. By Senate committees. By presidential advisers. By opposition politicians who became government officials and discovered the same problems from the other side of the desk.

The knowledge of what is wrong is not the bottleneck.

The bottleneck is that fixing each problem requires someone to stop receiving something they are currently receiving. And in a system where what you receive depends on what you control, giving up what you control is not a technical decision. It is a political one. With political consequences that fall immediately on the person who makes it, while the benefits of reform accrue slowly, diffusely, and to people who are not in the room.

That asymmetry is the reason the bridge between knowing and doing has never been built.

Not in this administration. Not in any of the ones before it.

Take the NNPC problem first, because it is the most structural.

Executive Order 9 was signed in February 2026. It directed that oil revenues go directly to the Federation Account instead of passing through NNPC first. It was the right diagnosis, stated as a presidential directive.

It has not resolved the underlying problem. Because the underlying problem is not that nobody issued the right instruction. It is that the institution receiving the instruction has operational control of the infrastructure through which the money flows, has legal cover from the Petroleum Industry Act that a presidential order cannot cleanly override, and has relationships with international oil companies, traders, and financiers that are older and more durable than any single administration.

For Executive Order 9 to work, NNPC would have to implement it against its own institutional interest. The National Assembly would have to amend the Petroleum Industry Act without the support of the legislators whose states benefit from the current deduction structure. The international oil companies operating under joint venture agreements would have to renegotiate arrangements that currently work in their favour.

None of those things are impossible. All of them are simultaneously politically expensive in ways that fall on specific people right now, while the benefits of doing them are general and arrive later.

This is not corruption as a moral category. It is corruption as an institutional structure. The incentives are the architecture. Changing the incentives requires changing who controls what. And the people who control what are the people who would have to vote for, sign, or implement the change.

The debt problem is different in character but similar in structure.

Nigeria cannot default on its external debt. The consequences, for access to international capital markets, for the cost of future borrowing, for the country's credit rating, would be severe and immediate. So the debt is serviced. Every quarter. Regardless of oil prices. Regardless of what else Nigeria needs those dollars for.

What Nigeria could do is stop accumulating new external debt at the rate it has been accumulating it. Issue fewer Eurobonds. Borrow less from bilateral creditors on terms that prioritise speed of disbursement over cost of repayment. Develop domestic capital markets deep enough to finance deficits in naira rather than dollars.

These are real options. They have real costs. Financing in naira rather than dollars means paying higher interest rates, which crowds out other spending. Issuing fewer Eurobonds means accepting a smaller deficit, which means cutting expenditure, which means specific programmes and specific people bearing that reduction.

Every government that has borrowed externally has done so because the alternative, cutting expenditure or raising domestic financing costs, was politically harder than issuing a bond that matures in ten years and becomes someone else's problem. That logic is rational from inside the position of the people making the decision. It is catastrophic in aggregate. And it has been rational for every administration, which is why the debt has accumulated to where it is.

What would change it? A government that believed the political cost of borrowing now was higher than the political cost of not borrowing. That calculation has not yet been made. And in an election year, it will not be made.

The refinery and fuel import problem is where the most visible progress has been made, and where the most important uncertainty remains.

The Dangote Refinery exists. It is producing. That is not nothing. For decades, Nigeria attempted to rehabilitate its state-owned refineries and failed. Private capital built what public institutions could not. That is a structural fact about what works and what doesn't in Nigerian industrial policy, and it is worth stating clearly.

But the refinery operating at full capacity requires a functioning domestic fuel market. A functioning domestic fuel market requires deregulated fuel prices. Deregulated fuel prices mean the market determines what Nigerians pay at the pump, which means prices rise to reflect true costs, which means the poorest Nigerians, who spend the highest proportion of their income on transport and fuel-dependent goods, bear the most acute short-term pain.

The 2023 subsidy removal was intended to be this step. But it was not accompanied by the social protection infrastructure that would have cushioned the impact for the most vulnerable. The palliatives were announced. They were not delivered at scale. The pain arrived. The protection did not.

So the political lesson that was learned from 2023 is that full deregulation without effective social protection produces popular anger that is real, immediate, and electorally significant. The lesson that should have been learned is that full deregulation requires social protection to be built first, or delivered simultaneously. Those are different lessons. The government learned the first one. The second one requires institutional capacity Nigeria has not yet demonstrated it can deploy at speed.

Until the domestic fuel pricing framework is resolved, the Dangote Refinery will operate in a constrained environment. It will not reach its potential. And Nigeria will continue spending foreign exchange on fuel imports it could be producing at home.

The transparency problem underlies all of the others, and it is the one where the solution is most technically straightforward and politically most difficult.

The CBN should publish a monthly net reserve figure. Full disclosure of forward and swap obligations. The number that is actually available, not the gross number that includes what is already committed.

NNPC should publish a complete, independently audited account of the journey of every dollar from oil sale to Federation Account remittance. Not a summary. A full reconciliation, verified by an auditor with no relationship to either NNPC or the government.

The NSIA should publish its criteria for activating the Stabilisation Fund, and those criteria should be applied mechanically, not politically. If the fund was built for currency stress, it should deploy in currency stress. The activation decision should not be a calculation about election optics.

These are not complex technical requirements. They are decisions about who has the right to know what, and who currently benefits from the public not knowing it. Opacity creates discretion. Discretion creates power. The people with the power to require transparency are the people whose power depends on the absence of it.

That is the wall. It is not technical. It is political. And it has held across every administration because the coalition that benefits from the current arrangement is larger, better organised, and more immediately powerful than the coalition that would benefit from change.

So what would actually have to happen?

Not what should happen. What would actually have to happen, given the terrain.

The first thing is a sustained external shock severe enough to make the cost of the current system higher than the cost of changing it. Nigeria has been through shocks before. The 2016 recession. The 2020 collapse. Each time, reforms were announced. Some were implemented. The underlying architecture survived. The shock has to be sustained long enough, and severe enough, that the political calculation shifts for a critical mass of the people who hold the levers. Nigeria has not yet had that shock. Or rather, it has had shocks that were painful enough to produce announcements but not painful enough to produce structural change.

The second thing is a reform coalition that reaches inside the existing system rather than opposing it from outside. The history of Nigerian reform is largely a history of technocrats producing the right recommendations and politicians absorbing those recommendations into the existing system without changing the system. What has worked, occasionally, is when a subset of the existing power structure concludes that their own long-term position is better served by a reformed system than by the current one. That coalition is rare. It requires people to think beyond the current electoral cycle. In an election year approaching 2027, that thinking is not the dominant mode.

The third thing is time. Which is the most uncomfortable answer, because time is not neutral. Every year the system continues as it is, Grace buys fewer kilograms. Every year the debt service continues, the dollars available for reserve accumulation shrink. Every year the refinery operates below capacity, the import dependency persists. Time does not wait for the political calculation to shift.

Here is the verdict the series has been building toward.

The Vice President was right that something is wrong. He was wrong about what it is. It is not poor management by the current administration. It is a system that was designed, over decades, to serve the people who built it. Those people are not villains. They are rational actors inside an incentive structure that rewards extraction over accumulation, opacity over transparency, and short-term political survival over long-term fiscal stability.

Changing that system requires changing who benefits from it. That is not a technical reform. It is a political renegotiation of who gets what from Nigeria's oil. That renegotiation has to happen while the people who currently get the most are still in the room.

Indonesia did it. Over thirty years, through policy consistency that survived multiple administrations, infrastructure investment that built non-oil export capacity, and institutional development that made the diversification durable. Nigeria knows what Indonesia did. The knowledge is not the gap.

The gap is that Indonesia's reform coalition was large enough and durable enough to survive the political cost of the transition. Nigeria has not yet assembled that coalition. Every component of it exists somewhere in the system. The people who understand the problem are inside the government. The technocrats who know what to do are inside the institutions. The private sector capacity that built the Dangote Refinery without waiting for the state is demonstrably real.

What does not yet exist is the political arrangement that would allow those components to act together, across electoral cycles, against the resistance of the people who benefit from the current system continuing.

That arrangement is what would actually have to change. Not a policy. Not a law. Not an executive order, however well-designed. A political arrangement. A coalition with enough power, enough durability, and enough shared interest in a different outcome to force the system to produce one.

Whether 2027 produces the conditions for that coalition, or whether it deepens the arrangements that make it harder, is the question the election will actually answer. Not which candidate has the better economic plan. Which political arrangement emerges from the campaign with enough coherence to govern differently from every arrangement that came before it.

Grace is still buying rice in cups.

She is not waiting for the coalition. She is not following the politics of the Petroleum Industry Act or the constitutional basis of Executive Order 9. She is measuring what she can afford against what she needs and finding the gap every week, in every market, in every cup.

The reserves are at a thirteen-year high.

Both things are true. The distance between them is not mismanagement. It is not corruption in the simple sense. It is a system, built across decades, that was never designed to close the distance.

The question this series set out to answer was: where is the money going?

Now you know.

The next question is harder. It is the one Grace cannot afford to wait for.

Who is the money for?

This concludes The Number That Lies, a four-part investigation into Nigeria's foreign reserves. 

Part One: The Misunderstanding.

Part Two: The Journey of a Dollar.

Part Three: Where the Dollar Goes After It Arrives.

Part Four: What Would Actually Have to Change.

The Bridge publishes every Saturday. It begins where the headlines stop.