The official removal happened in 2023. The pressure never did.

The petrol subsidy was removed in May 2023. That's the official story. Independent fuel marketers are telling a different one.

This week, marketers warned that subsidy arrears and FX volatility are squeezing margins again. Some depots have quietly adjusted pump prices in anticipation of higher landing costs tied to exchange rate movement. The specific mechanism of the old subsidy is gone. The pressure it was meant to address is still there, just distributed differently.

Here's how it works now. Marketers import petrol at a cost tied to the global oil price and the naira-dollar exchange rate. When the naira weakens, landing costs rise. Marketers either absorb the margin squeeze or pass it to the pump. There's no price cap anymore, so technically they can pass it on. But the political sensitivity of pump prices hasn't disappeared just because the subsidy did, so the adjustment tends to be quiet, incremental, depot by depot.

What changed in 2023 was who holds the exposure. Before removal, the government held it through the subsidy bill. After removal, the exposure sits with marketers until they move it to consumers. The cost didn't go away. It just changed hands.

This pattern has a longer history. Before the PIA, NNPC held excess oil revenues as a mechanism for managing downstream price pressure. Before that, the subsidy bill was a way of pricing naira depreciation out of pump prices. Each reform shifted the mechanism without addressing the underlying structure: Nigeria produces oil, doesn't refine enough of it domestically, pays for imports in dollars, and asks consumers to absorb the resulting currency exposure.

The Dangote refinery is supposed to change that math. It hasn't changed it yet.