On May 29, 2023, in the same breath as his inauguration speech, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu delivered a sentence that would reshape the daily arithmetic of nearly every Nigerian household: fuel subsidy is gone. Within days, petrol prices that had held for years at roughly ₦185 to ₦200 per litre more than doubled to around ₦537. It was, by any measure, one of the most consequential policy pivots in Nigeria's recent economic history — and three years on, with a fresh price hike sweeping the country in mid-July 2026, it is worth tracing the full arc of what that decision has meant in naira and kobo, rather than in abstractions.

The Numbers, Year by Year

The trajectory is stark when laid out in sequence. Before the subsidy removal, Nigerians had grown accustomed to petrol prices that, while occasionally adjusted, remained artificially suppressed by a subsidy regime that, at various points, consumed trillions of naira annually from the federal budget — money that critics argued disproportionately benefited smugglers and well-connected marketers rather than ordinary consumers, while defenders of the subsidy pointed to the real, immediate pain its removal would cause.

That pain arrived quickly. By September 2023, further deregulation of the downstream sector pushed prices to approximately ₦617 per litre, as the market adjusted to operating without government price support for the first time in over a decade. Through 2024, as the naira came under sustained pressure against the dollar following the Central Bank's own currency reforms, petrol prices climbed further, settling into a ₦750 to ₦900 range — a period that also saw the gradual ramp-up of the Dangote Refinery's domestic production, introducing the first real counterweight to Nigeria's near-total historical dependence on imported refined fuel.

By 2025 and into 2026, prices had settled into a new normal above ₦900, frequently exceeding ₦1,000 per litre, before the events of this past week pushed the market higher still: depot prices rising from ₦1,230 to ₦1,350 per litre starting July 17, 2026, with pump prices expected to follow toward ₦1,380 to ₦1,400 in many parts of the country. Measured from the pre-subsidy-removal baseline of roughly ₦185, that represents better than a seven-fold increase in three years — a pace far outstripping wage growth for the vast majority of Nigerian workers over the same period.

What Deregulation Was Supposed to Deliver

The policy logic behind the subsidy removal rested on a few core arguments that are worth revisiting now that enough time has passed to judge them against results. Proponents argued that ending the subsidy would free up federal revenue for infrastructure and social investment, eliminate the incentives for cross-border fuel smuggling that had plagued the subsidized regime, and — crucially — attract the private investment needed to build domestic refining capacity, since no investor could justify building a refinery to compete against artificially cheap subsidized imports.

On that last point, the emergence of the Dangote Refinery as a serious domestic supplier represents a genuine, if partial, vindication of the deregulation thesis. The refinery's ex-depot pricing, sitting at roughly ₦1,075 per litre in early July 2026 compared to the ₦1,100 to ₦1,400 charged by many import-dependent marketers, has demonstrably introduced competitive pressure into a market that previously had none. Whether that pressure will eventually pull the entire national market toward its lower end, or remain confined largely to Lagos and the South-West where the refinery's logistics advantage is strongest, remains one of the central open questions of the post-subsidy era.

The Cost Side of the Ledger

Set against that partial success is a set of costs that have fallen hardest on Nigerians with the least capacity to absorb them. Nigeria's inflation rate, sitting at 15.91 percent as of mid-2026 and expected to rise further with this month's fuel price adjustment, reflects in significant part the compounding effect of fuel costs working their way through transport, food distribution, and manufacturing input costs across the economy. A tomato that has to travel from a northern farm to a Lagos market carries the transport sector's fuel costs embedded in its final price; a loaf of bread reflects the fuel cost of running a bakery's ovens and delivering flour. Three years of steadily rising fuel prices have pushed that embedded cost higher across nearly every category of goods Nigerians buy daily.

The transport sector has borne this most visibly and most immediately. Commercial drivers who were charging ₦50 to ₦100 for short trips before 2023 now routinely charge several times that amount, adjustments that track the roughly seven-fold rise in their primary input cost. Household budgets that once allocated a modest share to daily transport now often dedicate a much larger portion, squeezing out spending on food quality, education costs, or savings that might otherwise have built some resilience against future shocks.

A Regional Story Layered on Top

The national numbers also obscure a persistent regional pattern that has held throughout the post-subsidy period: states closer to refineries or major fuel depots like Lagos, Port Harcourt and Warri have consistently paid less than northern and remote states, where transport logistics add substantial cost on top of whatever the national price trend is doing. This means the seven-fold national increase since 2023 has not been evenly felt — a Lagos resident and a Borno resident, both watching their local pump price climb over the past three years, have been climbing from different starting points and at somewhat different paces, with the gap between them, in absolute naira terms, growing larger as the overall price level rises.

Looking at the Next Three Years

Three years is enough time to draw some tentative conclusions, but not enough to call the transition complete. The Dangote Refinery's expansion remains ongoing, with further capacity increases plausible over the coming years that could extend its price-suppressing effect beyond its current stronghold in the South-West. The regulatory posture, reflected in NMDPRA's continued issuance of fresh import licenses even as domestic refining grows, suggests officials are betting on a hybrid market — part domestic, part imported — for the foreseeable future, rather than a rapid consolidation around local production alone.

What is clear, looking back from mid-July 2026, is that the subsidy removal delivered on some of its proponents' promises while imposing costs that have proven more severe and more prolonged than many Nigerians were initially led to expect. The seven-fold price increase since May 2023 is not a number that exists only in economic reports — it is lived, daily, by the commercial driver recalculating his fare, the trader absorbing higher transport costs before she even reaches the market, and the household quietly cutting back on something else each time the price at the pump climbs again. Whichever way the next three years break, that lived experience, more than any single policy announcement, will be how most Nigerians measure whether the promise of deregulation was ultimately kept.