Nigeria: Falana Urges Nigerian Govt to Ban Petrol Importation

What the report says

Human rights lawyer and Senior Advocate of Nigeria Femi Falana has called on the Nigerian federal government to stop petrol importation and direct the crude oil set aside for domestic use to local refineries. Speaking on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics, he argued that supplying the estimated 450,000 barrels per day reportedly allocated for local consumption to domestic refiners would lessen the country’s reliance on imported fuel and help reduce the hardship linked to petrol subsidy removal.

Falana said the subsidy regime had been costly and vulnerable to abuse, but he questioned whether Nigerians were seeing enough benefit from the additional revenue now flowing to governments at the federal, state and local levels. He also challenged official claims about fuel consumption and the continued scale of imports, saying Nigeria should be refining more of its own products given its crude resources and emerging refining capacity.

The comments came amid renewed public debate over the economic consequences of President Bola Tinubu’s decision to end the petrol subsidy in May 2023, with opposition figures and other politicians offering different views ahead of the 2027 election cycle. Falana also criticised the influence of the IMF and World Bank on Nigeria’s economic choices and said government should focus on accountability, better use of public funds and direct payment of local government allocations, in line with a Supreme Court ruling he cited. The reporting is from Premium Times and was distributed by AllAfrica.