If not for Buhari, you would have been buying fuel at N183 per litre — Sylva tells Nigerians

The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Timipre Sylva, has disclosed that Nigerians would have been paying about N183 per litre for petrol if not for the intervention of the president who decided that a full deregulation of the petroleum sector, would be too harsh on the masses.


The Minister who said this at a meeting in Abuja on Tuesday, September 15, revealed that Nigerians are still benefiting from indirect subsidy due to Federal Government selling dollars to importers at N391 instead of prevailing market price of about N450.

He said, “Why have we kept it at N161? Frankly speaking, let us face it and this is what I will tell you. One of the things that the president considered; he said if you take it to the full scale of deregulation, today, prices should have been around N183 because you all know this.



The minister said government’s current intervention was in the purchase of foreign exchange for the importation of petrol. He said importers, mainly the NNPC and its subsidiaries, were still buying dollars from the government at about N391 to a dollar contrary to the prevailing market price of about N450.

“The federal government spent N10.4 trillion on petrol subsidy between 2016 and 2019, while the country was losing N1 billion daily to fuel subsidy between 2016-2019,” he said.