How World Bank nearly talked Nigeria into economic trap
Samaila MohammedOn April 7, 2026, the World Bank released its latest report on Nigeria’s economy. Within days, the same report had vanished from their website. What happened in between tells us everything we need to know about the kind of advice Nigeria receives from powerful international institutions — and why we must stop swallowing it […]
Samaila MohammedOn April 7, 2026, the World Bank released its latest report on Nigeria’s economy. Within days, the same report had vanished from their website. What happened in between tells us everything we need to know about the kind of advice Nigeria receives from powerful international institutions — and why we must stop swallowing it whole.
The report recommended that Nigeria reopen petrol imports to bring prices down. By the time criticism mounted, the Bank had quietly pulled the document offline, then issued a statement saying its own advice ‘may run counter to efforts that countries around the world are undertaking to ensure their energy and national security.’ In plain language: we got it wrong. But the damage of bad advice is not undone by a press statement.
Nigeria’s policymakers, journalists, and citizens deserve to understand not just what went wrong — but the five specific gaps in the Bank’s thinking that should have disqualified the recommendation before it was ever published.
FIRST: THEY IGNORED OUR OWN LAW* Earlier in 2026, the Nigerian government suspended the licences that allowed companies to import petrol. This was not done on a whim. The Petroleum Industry Act — a law passed by our National Assembly in 2021 after decades of effort — specifically prohibits import licences when local production is sufficient. The Dangote refinery, now the main domestic supplier, qualifies as local production under that law. The World Bank’s recommendation to reopen imports would have put Nigeria in a position of violating its own statute. Remarkably, the 60-page report does not mention this legal constraint at all. You cannot give credible economic advice about a country’s fuel market without first reading the country’s fuel law.
SECOND: THEY MISDIAGNOSED WHY PETROL IS EXPENSIVE* The Bank’s evidence for recommending imports was a price comparison: imported petrol would cost about 12 per cent less than what the Dangote refinery currently sells for. That gap is real. But the Bank never asked the more important question — why is Dangote charging more? The refinery buys crude oil at world market prices. It operates expensive facilities in a country where gas, power, and logistics all cost more than in competing markets. There are also unresolved disputes over the terms on which the national oil company supplies crude to the refinery. If the government is not supplying crude to Dangote at fair and competitive terms, then of course imports will appear cheaper. But the correct fix is to sort out the crude supply arrangement — not to open the door to foreign petrol and declare the domestic refinery uncompetitive. Treating the symptom while ignoring the disease is not economic advice. It is guesswork.
THIRD: THEIR SAFETY NET RECOMMENDATION DOES NOT EXIST YET Every time Nigeria undertakes a major economic reform — fuel subsidy removal, exchange rate unification, deregulation — the World Bank and the IMF attach the same condition: protect the poor through social safety nets. It is sound advice in principle. In practice, Nigeria does not currently have a social safety net system capable of reaching the majority of vulnerable people at scale. The Bank itself acknowledged this in November 2025. The IMF made the same observation in June of that year. Recommending that market forces set petrol prices while simultaneously insisting that poor and vulnerable Nigerians will be cushioned by a protection system that doesn’t fully exist is not a balanced policy — it is wishful thinking that the poor will pay for.
FOURTH: THEY SAID NOTHING ABOUT FUEL QUALITY Anyone who has ever had their car damaged by adulterated fuel — or seen motorcycle repairers in Jos or Dutse or Katsina doing a roaring trade after a bad batch arrived in the market — understands this problem. When import licences were previously open, Nigeria received substandard petrol regularly. The economic incentive to import cheaper, lower-quality fuel is powerful, especially when the price gap is 12 per cent. The Bank’s report mentions ‘quality standards and regulatory oversight’ in passing, as a footnote. But, the report does not ask whether our downstream regulator, the NMDPRA, has the capacity to enforce standards at the volume of imports being recommended. If it doesn’t — and there is every reason to believe it does not — then import liberalisation becomes a gift to fuel adulterators, not to consumers.
FIFTH: THEY DID NOT ACCOUNT FOR THE NAIRA* Importing millions of litres of petrol means paying for them in dollars. Please note: Nigeria’s foreign exchange situation remains delicate. A significant increase in dollar demand for fuel imports would put pressure on the naira — which would then push up the price of everything else imported: food, medicine, spare parts, and raw materials. The Bank’s report notes that global oil prices are rising due to Middle East tensions, but it does not work through the chain of consequences: higher global prices plus more import volume equals more dollar demand equals naira pressure equals broader inflation. The 12 per cent saving at the petrol pump could easily be wiped out — and then some — by what it does to the exchange rate.
If the goal is affordable petrol without surrendering energy security, Nigeria has better options than import liberalisation. The first is a transparent pricing formula for the Dangote refinery — one based on verified costs, not arbitrary price-setting. Other countries, including South Africa and India, use regulated pricing frameworks that allow domestic refiners to earn a fair return while preventing them from overcharging. Nigeria could do the same, supervised by NMDPRA, without needing to import a single litre. The second is to get the BUA refinery in Akwai Ibom and the smaller modular refineries to function — even partially. The third is to privatise or concession the moribund federal government refineries at Kaduna, Warri and Port Harcourt. When there is more than one domestic supplier, competition happens inside the country, in naira, without foreign exchange exposure. The rehabilitation timelines of the FG refineries have been missed repeatedly. What is needed now is not another promise but a private management contract with performance penalties.
The fourth is to address the crude supply dispute directly. If Dangote is buying crude at a disadvantage, fix that arrangement. The solution to an upstream pricing problem is an upstream policy fix — not downstream import competition that undermines the very investment Nigeria spent years attracting.
In most countries, when a government agency publishes an official report and then quietly removes it from public record, it becomes a scandal. The World Bank is not a government agency, but it exercises enormous influence over Nigerian policy. The fact that it published a major recommendation, faced criticism, pulled the report without explanation, then issued a softened statement — all within four days — should concern anyone who cares about the quality of economic governance in this country. Nigeria is not short of problems. It is short of solutions that actually fit. International institutions bring resources, networks, and sometimes genuine expertise. But, they also bring template thinking — recommendations shaped more by global policy fashion than by the specific legal, institutional, and political realities of the country they are advising. The lesson of the vanishing petrol report is not that the World Bank is malicious. It is that its advice, taken uncritically and implemented without local scrutiny, can do real harm. Nigerian policymakers, legislators, civil society, and journalists must read these reports carefully, challenge them publicly, and build the domestic analytical capacity to know when international advice fits — and when it does not. We cannot afford to be governed by documents that disappear when the questions get hard.
Mohammed is a policy analyst