By Alabi Williams
Failure to plan is planning to fail. Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States is credited with this saying. It means that when there’s no preparation, strategy or foresight, failure is likely to be the result.
Today’s erratic movement of petrol pump price is a proof that Nigeria didn’t prepare for a moment like this. We’ve lost count the number of times Dangote Refinery and the NNPCL have adjusted pump prices for petrol and diesel, in less than one month. We’re remote-controlled by far away actions and inactions. For a ranking oil producing giant, that’s a legacy of living from hand to mouth. No strategy and no discipline to maximise opportunities and God-given advantages.
But the war in the Middle East didn’t happen without early warnings. It began with series of talks between the United States in Iran, from April 12, 2025 to February 27, 2026.
Then, mobilisation of forces by the United States began in late January, with the arrival of USS Abraham Lincoln carrier on January 26, 2026. The USS Gerald R. Ford was deployed on February 13, 2026. Every serious government knew a breakout of war that would have significant impact on global energy was imminent.
There was no known committee set up by the Bola Tinubu administration to contemplate a likely impact the war could have on Nigeria’s oil and gas. The only oil-related policy the government activate, which did not require any intellectual exercise, was to sign the Executive Order 9 of 2026, that mandated all government entitlements from oil and gas production to be remitted directly into the Federation Account. The order stopped the NNPCL from collecting the previous 30 per cent management fee and 30 per cent frontier Exploration Fund deduction.
Supporters hailed the Order because they also favour enlargement of the Federation Account by any means, without considering the accountability and transparency component of it. For a government that failed to fund capital budgets in 2025, but is quick to lavish resources on 2027 electioneering campaigns, through third parties and pliant governors, EO9 wasn’t about strategic planning, but an urgency to have more money to share.
While preparations for the U.S./Israel-Iran war were afoot, the National Assembly was busy manipulating amendment to the Electoral Act, to perpetuate electoral fraud. There was no significant critiquing of EO9 to decide whether the Order is well conceived, given the fact that there is no assurance that funds are safer and more accountable when they’re warehoused at Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC). The reasonable thing to have done was to return to the lawmakers and stakeholders to finetune the PIA. But President Tinubu doesn’t have time for that.
While the Middle East was already in turmoil, the other thing government did was to appoint a task force to design and sequence the next phase of structural reforms in Nigeria’s petroleum sector, to be chaired by Fola Adeola, co-founder of Guaranty Trust Bank and chairman of the Fate Foundation. The summary of its mandate is “unlock capital within the petroleum sector, and strengthen Nigeria’s position as a leading global energy investment destination.”
There was no mention of the ongoing war and what government would do to urgently mitigate the impact at both upstream and downstream. On March 13, 2026, when the task force was announced, the price of petrol was N1,175 per litre for Dangote. It was higher at other retail outlets. At the weekend, Dangote Refinery announced it had increased pump price to N1,245 per litre.
The Fola Adeola-led task force was not mandated to find ways to cushion the effects of spiraling pump prices. There was no mention of how to utilise the envisaged windfall from excess crude sales. For this government, the impression is that oil and gas must remain the cash cow, without concerted and believable efforts to diversify.
More money to share, little savings. Since the fuel subsidy was removed on May 29, 2023, FAAC has disbursed trillions to the federal, states and local governments. Total monthly disbursements have tripled from billions in pre-subsidy era to trillions. Between July 2023 and February 2024, FAAC shared over N5 trillion to the 36 states.
States have never had it so good, sometimes taking higher revenues than the Federal Government. But there is little to show for this surge. Citizens in states don’t have access to potable water. They sink boreholes by themselves. Healthcare hasn’t improved, instead, citizens now pay more for medicines and other household needs.
Governors, since 1999 are not in the habit of saving excess allocations. They waste allocations to acquire properties and they’re not answerable to anybody. The Federal Government that controls the legal instruments to demand accountability and transparency from governors, rather deploys them as instruments for political coercion.
Since the fuel subsidy was removed, the only reasonable thing some governors have done with excess allocations is that some have stopped borrowing from banks to pay salaries. Yet, some states have not implemented the N70,000 minimum wage. States are still heavily indebted. According to the Debt Management Office (DMO), as of September 2025, state’s total debt was N4.002 trillion.
They’re still borrowing and paying more to service previous loans. They blame it on naira depreciation. If not for Tinubu’s petrol tax (subsidy removal), which pain is borne by ordinary Nigerians, many states would have gone under. The danger with the economic policy of sharing petrol money is that it is not sustainable. States have been sharing FAAC allocations for 60 years. They abandoned legacy agro-investments they inherited from former regional governments.
Many states don’t have good network of roads. It takes the rainy season to expose how deplorable states’ roads are. Monies borrowed in the pretext for infrastructure development don’t deliver affordable infrastructure. They go for white elephant projects that take years of appropriations to deliver. Sometimes, they are abandoned. Local governments are worse in terms of governance and accountability, because of their distance from prying eyes. They get away with a lot of misgovernance, apart from a few that are located in urban areas.
There used to be the Excess Crude Account (ECA), where revenues exceeding budgeted benchmark for crude are stored for difficult times such as this. The ECA was created in 2004, to “serve as fiscal buffer against oil price volatility.” Checks revealed that it remained inactive as at last week because governors preferred sharing the fund than saving it. From around $22 billion in 2008-2009, the balance is said to be less than $1 million as at 2022.
It was spent on other indulgences, including military expenses. Efforts to revive the ECA under this government have only yielded marginal gains. The Fund is still lumbering around $534,823.39. It cannot offer any buffer now that Nigerians are at the receiving end of global oil and gas crisis. It failed the purpose for which it was set up. A country with no fiscal discipline.
There is also the Nigeria Sovereign Wealth Fund (NSWF), established in 2011 to invest excess hydrocarbon revenues. Just like the ECA, it was designed to stabilise the economy when oil prices are volatile, and to invest in critical infrastructure and save for the future.
It is doubtful that the NSWF has delivered its primary targets. The economy is not protected from global shocks resulting from the crisis in the Middle East. Nigerians are exposed to risks and are paying dearly for it. In terms of critical infrastructure, the deficit is massive, as the country’s infrastructure stock is estimated at only 30 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It will thus require an estimated $2.3 trillion to $3 trillion over 20-30 years to fix the infrastructure gap in the country.
Experts say that would mean $100 billion annual investment. As for saving for the future, the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA), managers of NSWF, says it targets to double the $3 billion in its coffers within the next three years. The windfall from the Middle East Crisis will help, but that depends on government’s sincerity.
President Tinubu announced in 2024 that the government saves approximately $7.5 billion annually from subsidy removal. But where are the savings? Nigerian’s total debt as of early 2026, is estimated to exceed N153 trillion. The government is borrowing mercilessly despite subsidy savings. Doesn’t make economic sense.
Too many lofty ideas and policies on paper but living is excruciating for the people, long before this additional pain from the Middle East. There is a gap to fix between good planning and execution, between campaign rhetoric and actual delivery. This government is high on rhetoric and very low on delivery.
Were the state-owned refineries in Port Harcourt, Kaduna and Warri to be functional, that would have absorbed the shocks from the pains of imported PMS. In December 2024, President Tinubu commended the Mele Kyari-led management team at NNPCL, for successfully rehabilitating the Warri Refinery and Petrochemical Company.
Port Harcourt had resumed production in November 2024, and was equally commended. Warri was said to be operating at 60 per cent capacity and the President assured Nigerians that the two remaining refineries in Kaduna and Port Harcourt would be restored to make the country energy secure. Nigerians believed him.
Over $3 billion was specifically approved in 2021 to rehabilitate Warri and Port Harcourt refineries, but it had cost around $20 billion to keep all the refineries alive since the Fourth Republic commenced. And that was about the same amount Dangote spent to deliver the best refinery in Africa. And nobody was punished for failing to deliver after huge payments and government did not ask the contractors to return monies paid to them. That is the classic example of planning to fail.
With functional public refineries and crude available locally, the economy could have managed to stay safe while the Gulf burns. But we planned to fail. It is worse for the economy that the priority of the Tinubu administration is to make more money available for FAAC to share. That’s not good planning. It endangers the future.
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