The petrol fire on our roof

On Thursday, 10 September, 2026, I bought petrol worth ₦90,259 for my car. Eight days later, on Friday, 18 September, the vehicle flashed its annoying yellow warning light. I fed it another ₦30,000 worth of petrol. By Tuesday, 22 September, four days later, the tank was empty again. I refilled it with ₦91,137. What I bought was not luxury. I bought movement, the means to go to work and return home.

It is crazy. I present myself here as the primary exhibit in this trial of pain. I have the receipts. Add my figures. Between 10 and 22 September, a period of just 12 days, I spent a total of ₦211,396 on petrol for one car. That comes to an average of ₦17,616 every day. If that “burning sensation” is sustained for 30 days, approximately ₦528,490 would be gone. In one year, it will be ₦6,429,840 (nearly ₦6.43 million) flared like NNPC’s gas.

I showed my calculation to a wise friend; with a deep sigh, she asked: if merely getting to work consumes the earnings from the work, what exactly is the purpose of working?

There is trouble on the roof. Like the Great Fire of Rome which in AD 64 scarred almost every part of the city, displaced residents, drove up rents and deepened hardship, Nigeria’s petrol-price fire is ravaging household incomes, raising the price of everything, killing businesses and leaving the poor breathless.

It will be strange if the reader here does not suffer what I suffer. That would mean that I am paying alone for a sin I cannot remember committing. But I am not alone. All around me, people check the figures again and again, and I see them drenched in sweat. How is that expenditure sustainable for a working-class person, a pensioner, or a private person in some self-employment? What salary or income would withstand this daily assault and still take care of family, pay electricity bills, medical expenses and the ever-rising cost of food?

I am not an economist but I know that in most households, the hide no longer covers the face of the drum. Check how the talking drum is made and see what I mean and the implications.

In all this, where is our government and where is the president? Why do we need them in the first place? Aristotle teaches that the fundamental purpose of political society is for the state to enable its citizens to live well. Read Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Read Thomas Hobbes. Read John Locke. Living well is the ultimate purpose of the social contract. That is why I asked for the president. After all, the Yoruba say, “Ẹni tí a bá ní ní ńgbani” (the person one has is the one who comes to one’s aid). The president governs from outer space while his legions, mounted on the rostrum of sermons, demand our votes. They appear not to know, or simply do not care, that Ẹni tí ebi ńpa ò gbọ́ ìwàásù: a starving person hears no preaching.

It is bad. And it will not get better until the right physician arrives with the right medicine. When that will be, and who that physician will be, I do not know.

Now, what has been the response of governments of other nations, particularly of the countries to which our leaders run for health, for sense and for comfort? I ask as I watch people around me run from pillar to post, in search of relief.

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France is where our president lies duvetted while his people freeze at home. If he listened to the news there, he would have heard that the French government did not respond to the petrol-price crisis by wringing its hands, preaching hope or calling for prayers. It stood by its people and took concrete steps, expanding targeted relief for those most severely affected by soaring fuel prices.

“We are aware that the situation is very difficult for our fellow citizens, particularly those who drive to work every day, especially those on the lowest incomes,” Finance Minister Roland Lescure told a news conference Tuesday last week.

The French intervention, according to reports, focused on low-income workers who travel long distances to work, expanding the number of eligible beneficiaries from three million to 5.5 million.

Britain was where our president first landed before pivoting to France for an absence that has lasted almost 30 days. In November last year (2025), the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, announced in Parliament an extension of the country’s fuel-duty relief: “I know that the cost of travelling to and from work is still too expensive … so I am extending the 5p cut until September 2026.” In May this year, as fuel prices continued to rise, the British government extended the five-pence-per-litre reduction again, this time until the end of December 2026.

In nearby Germany, the government announced a temporary tax reduction of €0.17 per litre of petrol and diesel, effective from 1 October until the end of the year. Spain proposed a relief package that included a reduction of up to 30 cents per litre, with a separate 20-cent subsidy for the agricultural and transport sectors. Prosperous Japan has been subsidising fuel wholesalers to restrain prices at the pump, supplementing that intervention with payments to low-income households

I did not invent any of the foregoing. I searched, found, cross-checked and confirmed every detail. Check Reuters; check the Financial Times; check Britain’s Guardian; check the official statements of the governments concerned. You may find there even more than I have written.

In a season of general famine, Tortoise was found cooking water, he told his disappointed audience that “at least I am doing something with our situation.” The governments of the countries I mentioned here may still be grappling with the fire of this fuel crisis, but at least their fire brigades arrived with water. Ours came bearing the thick saliva of CNG promises.

The president is our big daddy; he speaks my dialect of the Yoruba language, therefore, privately or publicly, I must never be heard querying his policies or questioning his lack of policy. I must keep quiet and endure this dark, dank moment without a murmur because the president is my big brother, and Big Brother has promised that dawn will come.

As we wait for the promised morning, like me, you may ask: “How did we arrive here?” Perhaps you were an Emilokan devotee three years ago but now wonder what became of the man who led Occupy Nigeria in 2012, denounced high petrol prices as an “unfair burden” on the poor and, in 2022, promised Nigerians ìfọ̀kànbalẹ̀ (peace of mind). Go and read Alexander Fuks’s ‘Plato and the Social Question’. Drawing on Plato’s Republic, Fuks describes “the leader of the people” who “wages a bloody and ruthless campaign against the rich” while dangling “promises of cancellation of debts and redistribution of land.” Then comes the chilling consummation: “When this civil war has run its course, he will stand erect in the chariot of the state, with the reins in his hand, no longer a protector of the people but tyrant absolute.”

At between N1,385 and N1,430 per litre, cost of petrol has become a nationwide conflagration, burning through household incomes and consuming the peace of families. The government should be the fire brigade battling the blaze. But it appears clueless. The only water in its tank is the thick sputum of CNG, too foul and too impotent to quench the flames or, at least, subdue their devouring tongues.

I wanted to ask the president: How long must an exhausted people wait for your morning? And how many will still be standing when your promised dawn finally breaks? I wanted to ask those questions but the president is very far away on vacation, enjoying in France on my behalf.

In the midst of this chaos, the government sits, looking bewildered, empty-handed and clueless about what to do next. Yet, it celebrates swelling foreign reserves while preaching sermons of hope to a people sinking ever deeper into poverty. We have the vaults of the Central Bank wealthy, but the purchasing power of the people is eroded. What do you call that? We have prosperity in the treasury and penury in the marketplace. A withering season as this is what economists would see and call the “paradox of plenty.”

If you have a voice, please this is the time to say something. The Nigerian columnist is by no means among the poorest; he will probably survive these bad times. But what becomes of the millions who have neither his means nor his voice? In this season of silence, why is the crier crying and whining? Some people must have asked him to make this noise and make the government look bad. But the child who weeps knows why he is weeping; the mother holding the handkerchief of consolation should also know the source of the child’s tears.

We say in Yorubaland that if the cry of “Ìbòsí o!” (calamity!) is sung instead of shouted, the crowd will dance to it. That is precisely what the physicians who prescribed this hardship demand: that we plaster over the rough, tough suffering we suffer with the putty of sweet music and dance.

But a song of silence would be unnatural here under this suffocating air. If a load refuses to rest on the rafters and is disdainful of the floor, there is always somewhere else for it. The biblical walls of Jericho did not fall to songs of praise. They fell when silence gave way to a concerted shout.

Think about this: The present woes of the street in Nigeria are suffocating. But those in power insist that the blame lies in Tehran and Washington, not in Abuja. I wish I could tell them that long before Iran and America began their dance of death, the spirit of suffering, under Abuja’s spell, had taken possession of Nigeria’s nights and days.

Deliverance requires more than bending the knee and singing “Pass Me Not By.” Even when the shrieks of war would have fallen silent in the Strait of Hormuz, who says the fire here will have burnt itself out? Ask those in charge for the road out of the mass suffering, and they will point vaguely in the direction of “hope.” But hope, renewed or expired, is neither a road nor a destination. In fact, that thing called “hope” has never been a solution anywhere to problems of existence.

We know where we are, so, where are we going?

If Aesop, the ancient storyteller, had lived in Nigeria in 2026, he might have told the story of a lion who ruled a forest in famine.

But Aesop can still tell the story to our lion and his assembly of carnivores. The storyteller would gather his audience beneath the moonlight and begin:

For generations, all animals of the forest, big and small, had drawn a small ration from the communal storehouse to supplement the cost of feeding their families. Then, on the first day of his reign, King Lion sealed the grain house and declared, “The subsidy is gone.” He said the old arrangement was wasteful, that cunning beasts were stealing from it and that the grains saved would be replanted to build a more prosperous forest. Half of the beasts of the forest, especially those of the cat family, praised Lion’s wisdom. They said he had displayed uncommon courage that would birth unprecedented prosperity for all.

But prosperity did not come; neither were grains of the future planted. Instead, food became dearer, journeys to the watering hole cost more and every burden in the forest grew heavier. Still, each morning, the lion’s collectors took half the animals’ dwindling provisions to the royal storehouse. All animals complained of hunger, Lion blamed a drought in a distant forest.

“Be patient,” he told them. “The rains of hope are coming.”

To cover the grumbling, lion supplied the birds ambassadorial feathers, fed and ordered them to turn every cry of distress into a song of renewed hope. “We are hungry!” was soon sung so sweetly that the lion danced whenever he heard it. He mistook the music for gratitude and the animals’ silence for contentment.

One day, Tortoise crawled to the palace and warned the king: “Your Majesty, hunger that you say must not speak has learnt another language.”

Almighty Lion heard ugly Tortoise and laughed. He dismissed the warner and his worries.

But the very next day, when the king’s collectors entered the forest, they found no animal waiting to surrender their food. The whole lot had gathered at the palace to reclaim the storehouse. King Lion called for his guards.

“Where are the guards?” he roared.

To the king’s horror, the guards, too, were hungry. They had joined the crowd.

In his 1935 essay, ‘Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties’, German playwright and poet, Bertolt Brecht, identifies the qualities required to break conspiratorial silence and communicate truth from inside the lion’s den. To write the truth, he says, the writer “must have the courage to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed; the keenness to recognise it, although it is everywhere concealed; the skill to manipulate it as a weapon; the judgment to select those in whose hands it will be effective; and the cunning to spread the truth among such persons.”

Taken together, Bertolt Brecht’s “five difficulties” read like one pithy proverb on rebellion and survival. Shakespeare supplies the proverb’s final command in King Lear: “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” Truth must be spoken, but Brecht reminds us that, in dangerous times, it must also be said with tact. The reason the bard here begged Aesop to create the above warning, the story of the unfeeling lion and the end that came.

If you are a town crier, do your work now before it is too late. American civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr., in his ‘Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence’ speech delivered on 4 April, 1967, warned against the perils of shilly-shallying. On that rostrum, as he warned against temporisation, moral hesitation, complicity, and ethical failure, he rammed it in that over the residues of numerous civilizations are written the words “Too late”.

In his ‘Trouble with Lichen’, English writer, John Wyndham, warns “about the inevitable time when, unless we do something to stop it, men will be hunting men through the ruins, for food.” He thinks “we’re letting it drift towards that, with an evil irresponsibility…” We may soon be there.

English modernist poet and playwright, T.S. Eliot, concludes his ‘The Hollow Men’ with the insistence that the world would end “Not with a bang but a whimper.” I disagree with Eliot. I would rather go elsewhere. And that is back to Wyndham who warns in his post-apocalyptic thriller, ‘The Day of the Triffids’, that humanity’s “most persistent and comforting hallucinations” is to trust that ‘it can’t happen here’—that one’s own little time and place is beyond cataclysms.”

In sound as in meaning, “cataclysm” is an ugly, unpleasant word. Yet it invariably berths at harbours where good men and bad men converse in silence. By their silence, those two giants grant very safe passage to evil.

So, I end with Wyndham who has assisted me in rebuking the complacent belief that Nigeria can continue drifting without eventually arriving at disaster.