MINISTER of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Wale Edun, has declared that the Federal Government will not reintroduce petrol subsidy, despite rising fuel prices linked to the ongoing tensions in the Middle East.
Edun made the position known on Tuesday during a media briefing of the Intergovernmental Group of 24, held on the sidelines of the launch of the April 2026 Global Financial Stability Report by the International Monetary Fund. He explained that the economic reforms introduced in 2023 under Bola Tinubu including the removal of fuel subsidy and the liberalisation of the foreign exchange market were necessary and have received backing from global financial institutions.
According to the minister, while the reforms had begun to yield positive outcomes, their gains have been partly eroded by external shocks beyond Nigeria’s control. “As you know, in the case of Nigeria, that moved very rapidly under the President who came in 2023 to remove subsidies on petroleum products, and to also remove subsidies that were related to the foreign exchange markets,” Edun said.
“And so those gains, which, if we look at them, were moving at pace and have now been negatively affected by an external shock, which had nothing to do with Nigeria or developing countries as a whole. Having made so much progress, it is important that we don’t return to generalised subsidies, a sort of relapse into policies that have not proven successful in the past,” he added.
Edun warned that reversing the policy direction would undermine economic stability, insisting instead that targeted relief measures remain the most viable approach. He noted that Nigeria and other oil-producing countries should focus on temporary and well-targeted support for vulnerable citizens rather than reversing key reforms.
The minister, who currently chairs the G-24, further explained that the impact of the current crisis varies across economies, unlike the experience during the COVID-19 pandemic, stressing that the effects are not one-directional.
“For the oil-producing countries, the Ecuador and Nigeria, you may say, there is the transmission of higher oil prices into higher revenues,” he said.
“All of that is meaningful for the governments at this time, which is totally different from oil-importing countries, who clearly face escalated costs.
“But I must say that it’s also not a one-way street, in the sense that even an oil-producing country does have transmission of the higher costs, which feeds through from gas prices to fertilizer to food prices and so forth. So it is on both sides that this current energy crisis is affecting countries.”
He added that resilience is critical in navigating the shocks, noting that countries must rely on buffers already built while providing targeted assistance to the most vulnerable.
“I think that the idea is to be able to have the resilience to weather the current shocks, and that means the buffers that have been built have to be used. But I think that it is a question of using targeted and temporary relief, particularly for the poor and the most vulnerable, to help them through the cost-of-living spike, as opposed to rolling back the transformations which economies have taken,” he said.
Meanwhile, on April 14, the Chairman of the Nigeria Revenue Service, Zacch Adedeji, warned that Nigeria’s subsidy burden could have surged dramatically under current global oil price conditions.
He noted that at an oil benchmark of $120 per barrel, the country’s annual subsidy bill could have risen to between N38 trillion and N52 trillion—equivalent to as much as 56 to 76 percent of the proposed N68 trillion 2026 budget.