Thursday 16 April, 2026

If deregulation was supposed to fix Nigerian energy, what exactly has it fixed?

Something happened this week that is worth sitting with.

Nigeria spent years building the case for removing energy subsidies. The argument was real. Subsidies were expensive, badly targeted, and captured by middlemen who enriched themselves on the gap between the official price and the market. Remove the subsidy, expose the market, let competition do its work.

The government removed the subsidies. Petrol subsidies went in 2023. The electricity tariff was restructured. The fuel market was deregulated. The official language was "market reform."

Now it's 2026. Jet A1 has gone from ₦900 to ₦3,300 in six weeks. That is 300% up, while global crude rose 30%. The electricity generation that was supposed to improve with the deregulated tariff is at 3,345MW, down from 5,000MW last year. Diesel prices remain out of reach for most small businesses. Petrol prices have risen multiple times since subsidy removal.

The pattern the deregulation critics warned about has arrived. Not because the market is working. Because the infrastructure that was supposed to make a market possible doesn't exist in Nigeria. You can't have a functioning fuel market without competitive distribution. You can't have a functioning electricity market without metering, payment infrastructure, and a transmission grid that doesn't collapse. Deregulation in a market with structural monopolies doesn't produce competition. It produces extraction.

The question the week is forcing is this. At what point does the government acknowledge that the problem isn't the price of energy in Nigeria? The problem is who controls the system through which energy moves, and what accountability they face when they use that control to extract rather than supply.

You already know the answer to that, probably. The question is whether anyone in government is willing to say it out loud.