Isaac Newton got a lot of things right. Gravity, motion, calculus. But if he were a Nigerian commuter standing in front of a filling-station price board this morning, he might quietly return his medals and ask for his textbooks back.
Because somewhere along the way, Nigeria appears to have amended the laws of gravity. Here, what goes up does not necessarily come down. It rises, settles comfortably at the top and begins behaving as though it has acquired permanent residency there.
Waking up in Nigeria to a new fuel price has become an extreme sport,our very own version of a surprise birthday party, except the gift is emotional damage and your transport fare has tripled.
Pump prices don’t just change,they shapeshift under the moonlight. Printers in filling stations work harder than corporate law firms on judgment day, slamming fresh paper tags over old ones.
Whenever the price climbs, the economic prophets come out to explain why. Today, it’s global crude dancing, tomorrow it’s geopolitical tension in a village you can’t spell on a map, and next week it will probably be because a mermaid sneezed in the Atlantic Ocean.
Strangely, when global oil prices crash down, local prices respond with the majestic silence of a deaf monk.
Yesterday, N1,350 felt like a ceiling. Today, it looks like ancient history, a sweet nostalgic era we will tell our grandchildren about while trekking to work to save bus money.
Once upon a time: Fuel was so cheap people used it to clean greasy engine parts.
Then: It was NGN X. Everyone complained.
Next year: It doubled. Everyone cried.
Now: The price tag looks like a mid-range laptop’s RAM specification.
If fuel prices were on a dating app, their bio would read: “I only go higher. Commitment issues with coming down. If you can’t handle me at my highest, too bad, I’m about to go higher anyway.”
Another petrol-price adjustment is enough to remind us of this peculiar national law. The announcement may arrive wrapped in the familiar language of market forces, international prices, exchange rates, landing costs, supply conditions and other respectable economic expressions. But the ordinary Nigerian understands the equation rather more simply: somehow, whatever happens, the price at the pump finds a way to become higher.
That is the part that would amuse an economist and exhaust everybody else. We are constantly told that petrol prices are determined by market realities, and fair enough: markets rise and fall. When costs increase, prices increase, and when those pressures ease, prices should eventually respond in the other direction. That is what a functioning market is supposed to do.
Nigerian consumers, however, have become increasingly suspicious of the second half of that arrangement.
When international crude prices rise, the explanation arrives almost immediately. When the naira weakens, we hear about foreign-exchange exposure. When shipping becomes more expensive, demurrage enters the conversation. When supply tightens, we are told to understand the market. Nigerians may not understand every line on the economist’s spreadsheet, but they understand perfectly well what happens when they reach the filling station and discover that yesterday’s money will not buy today’s petrol.
The mystery begins when the pressures go the other way. When some of those costs fall, the relief often seems to disappear somewhere between the spreadsheet and the filling station. It is as though the market has an excellent memory for bad news and a rather unfortunate case of selective amnesia when good news arrives.
Petrol prices also possess a remarkable talent for changing while the country sleeps. Somewhere in the early hours, a price Nigerians paid yesterday quietly disappears. By morning, the pump has acquired a new figure, and the commuter discovers that yesterday’s transport budget has already become a historical document.
There is no need for a town crier. The information travels by itself. Once the filling station changes its price, the transport operator recalculates the fare, the trader works out what it will now cost to move goods, the small business owner begins another round of arithmetic, and the worker discovers that getting to work has become more expensive without the office adding a single naira to the salary. By the end of the day, the increase has travelled through the economy with the efficiency of a rumour.
The explanation, meanwhile, becomes increasingly sophisticated.
We hear about deregulation, subsidy removal, crude benchmarks, foreign exchange, refining capacity, import costs and domestic supply. All of these things matter. Petrol does not become cheaper merely because Nigerians are tired of paying for it. There are genuine costs behind the price, and pretending otherwise would be as dishonest as pretending that the Nigerian economy can be understood through social-media arithmetic.
But there is another reality that cannot be buried beneath economic vocabulary: Nigerians experience increases almost immediately, while the benefits of lower costs can take a much longer journey to reach them.
That is where this stops being merely a story about petrol.
The deeper problem is the peculiar asymmetry Nigerians have become accustomed to, in which almost every economic development seems to have a functioning mechanism for pushing prices upward, while the mechanism for bringing those prices back down is somehow always under examination.
If the naira strengthens, there may be other factors to consider. If crude prices fall, there may be a lag. If transportation becomes cheaper, existing stock may have been purchased at a higher cost. If energy prices decline, the market may still be adjusting. There is almost always another explanation waiting in the wings.
Some of those explanations will be perfectly legitimate. That is precisely why this argument should not descend into the lazy assumption that every price increase is evidence of greed and every price that refuses to fall is proof of conspiracy. Markets are complicated, and anybody who tells Nigerians that there is one simple reason for every movement in the price of petrol is probably selling something.
But complexity cannot become a permanent hiding place.
If Nigerians are being asked to accept market pricing, then the market should be capable of moving in both directions. The same economic logic used to explain why prices must rise should also be capable of explaining why they should fall. Otherwise, “market forces” begins to sound less like an economic principle and more like the name of a very powerful relative who has a remarkable talent for arriving whenever the bill needs to be paid.
For the Nigerian living on a fixed income, none of this is theoretical. A higher petrol price changes the journey to work, the cost of running a small business, the price of food transported from farms to markets and, eventually, the cost of almost anything that has to move from one place to another.
The person at the bottom of the economic ladder does not experience “landing cost” as an abstract concept. He experiences a higher bus fare. She does not experience “foreign-exchange volatility” as a line on a financial report; she experiences a food bill that has quietly become larger. The small business owner does not experience an “energy-market adjustment” in the language of an economist. He experiences another month in which the figures refuse to balance.
That is why Nigerians joke about petrol prices with such extraordinary creativity. The humour is not proof that the pain is small. In many cases, it is evidence of how familiar the pain has become.
We turn economic distress into memes because sometimes laughter is cheaper than despair. We joke about cars running on prayer, generators becoming permanent members of the family and a simple journey across town requiring the kind of financial planning once reserved for international travel. At some point, asking a neighbour for a ride may require a written agreement, two guarantors and perhaps a small parcel of land as collateral.
It is funny until you remember why the joke exists.
And the arithmetic is not funny.
A country that produces crude oil but has spent decades struggling to turn that resource into reliable domestic energy has created one of the world’s strangest economic spectacles. We have the commodity beneath our soil, yet affordable and dependable energy remains an aspiration for millions of citizens.
The long-term answer cannot simply be another explanation for why Nigerians should pay more. Nigeria needs functional domestic refining that reduces dependence on imported petroleum products, genuine competition in the downstream market so efficiency is rewarded, and transparent pricing that allows consumers to understand how international benchmarks, exchange rates, refining costs and other variables become the number displayed at the pump.
Most importantly, when those underlying costs fall, Nigerians should be able to see the benefit without having to organise a national protest to ask where it went.
Imagine waking up one morning and driving past a filling station to discover that petrol is suddenly cheaper by a meaningful amount. There is no presidential broadcast, no emergency press conference and no dramatic announcement. There is simply a lower number on the board.
The attendant might have to repeat it twice. A customer might take out a calculator. Somebody would probably ask whether the station had made a mistake. Another person would call a friend to confirm that the same thing was happening elsewhere.
And somewhere, perhaps, Isaac Newton would look down at Nigeria, adjust his spectacles and conclude that gravity has finally been restored.
Until that day, the Nigerian consumer remains trapped in a strange economic universe where prices know exactly how to climb but seem to lose their sense of direction once they reach the top. The market can find a hundred reasons to explain the journey upward; Nigerians are still waiting for it to demonstrate that it remembers the road back down.
In Nigeria, what goes up must stay up.
At least until somebody proves otherwise.
Stephanie Shaakaa shaakaastephanie02@gmail.com
08034861434
