Nigeria Must Not Swallow the World Bank's Petroleum Pill Whole.
The World Bank is at it again. Its’ April 2026 Nigeria Development Update recommends reopening the premium motor spirit market to competition, essentially nudging Nigeria back toward dependence on petroleum imports. The argument sounds reasonable on the surface - more competition, lower prices, less reliance on a single refinery - but scratch beneath that surface and you find a recommendation that could hollow out Nigeria's hard-won energy future.
Let us be clear about what "liberalising the market" often means in the Nigerian context. It means handing import licences to well-connected individuals who will use the arbitrage between landing costs and pump prices to enrich themselves, not to serve Nigerians. We have lived that story before, the era of fuel subsidies and import-dependent downstream sector was not a golden age of affordability. It was a golden age of corruption, round-tripping, and phantom petrol shipments. Opening that door again under the banner of "boosting competition" risks repeating one of Nigeria's most expensive economic sins.
More critically, this recommendation arrives precisely at the moment Nigeria has something genuinely worth protecting, the Dangote Refinery. Africa's largest refinery represents not just an industrial achievement but a structural shift in Nigeria's energy sovereignty. It creates jobs, retains value within the economy, and reduces the chronic foreign exchange haemorrhage that petrol imports have always caused. To flood the market with cheap imports now is to starve that refinery of the commercial oxygen it needs to survive its early and most vulnerable years.
No serious industrial nation built its energy security by outsourcing it. The World Bank's models are not always wrong, but they are not always right for every context either. Nigeria must engage these recommendations critically, not obediently. Protect the refinery, protect the jobs, protect the future.