When the leadership of Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers,(NUPENG) walked into the Presidential Villa last week and told President Bola Tinubu “thank you,” my first instinct was suspicion. Call it a Nigerian journalist’s occupational hazard. In a country where labour unions and government have historically related like cat and mouse, a trade union showing up to praise a President is not something you see every day. So I did what I always do when politicians and their allies start singing from the same hymn sheet: I went looking for the catch.
I didn’t find one that discredits the substance, and that surprised me.
To be sure, I have covered enough Villa events to know the choreography. A minister praises the President, a union leader is wheeled out to say a few grateful words, everyone claps, and the story dies by the next news cycle. I expected something similar this time. What I got instead was a union president standing in the same room where his members once threatened strike action, telling the man they threatened to confront that the country is better off for a decision they originally opposed. That is not choreography. That is an admission, and admissions from people with skin in the game carry more weight than communiqués from spokesmen.
Let’s be honest about where we started. When Tinubu removed the fuel subsidy in his very first speech as President in May 2023, without the usual months of “stakeholder engagement” and soft landing rhetoric that Nigerian leaders love to hide behind, the country nearly came apart at the seams. Fuel prices tripled almost overnight. NUPENG itself threatened strikes. Nigerians, already weary from a punishing electoral season, braced for the kind of hardship that has broken governments before. I was not one of the President’s cheerleaders at the time, and I said so on this page.
Two years on, the picture Comrade Oladiti painted at the Villa was of an administration that has begun converting that pain into something tangible. He commended Tinubu for what he called a courageous decision that has “saved the country from decades of financial drain.” That is a union leader talking, not a Presidential spokesman, and the distinction matters. Unions exist to hold governments accountable, not to flatter them. When NUPENG credits the subsidy removal with freeing up resources for the 750-kilometre Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway and the 1,068-kilometre Sokoto-Badagry Superhighway, that is a claim any Nigerian can verify by simply driving those routes, or by watching the construction convoys that have become a familiar sight on federal roads in the last two years.
Mind you, I am not here to hand out gold stars simply because a union said nice things. Nigerians have heard promises about subsidy savings before, and we have watched those savings vanish into accounts nobody can trace. That is precisely why Tinubu’s pledge to publish exactly how the subsidy savings were utilised matters more than the pledge to fix the refineries. Publish the figures, Mr President. Line by line, kobo by kobo. Anything less than an open ledger will hand ammunition right back to the sceptics.
Now to the refineries themselves, the sore subject that has embarrassed every administration since Obasanjo. Nigerians have watched successive governments announce, with straight faces, that the Port Harcourt or Warri refinery is “back on stream,” only for fuel imports to continue as if nothing happened. So when Tinubu told NUPENG that flames and smoke from a refinery chimney are not proof that the facility works, and that a refinery must actually run at a profit and deliver the value it was built for, he was saying out loud what most Nigerians have quietly suspected for two decades. That single admission carries more credibility than a hundred ribbon-cutting ceremonies. It suggests, at minimum, that this government understands the difference between activity and achievement, which is more than I can say for some of its predecessors.
I don’t believe in giving anyone a pass simply because they finally sound like they get it. Understanding the problem is the easy part. Nigerians have watched refineries limp along on turnaround maintenance contracts worth billions of dollars that produced nothing but more turnaround maintenance contracts. The test of this latest assurance will not be another speech at the Villa. It will be litres of petroleum product, refined in Nigeria, at prices that make economic sense, showing up at the pump within a verifiable timeline. Until then, “the refineries are going to come back to work” remains a promise, not a fact.
I have watched this movie before, and so has every Nigerian above the age of thirty. The Port Harcourt refinery alone has swallowed billions of dollars in rehabilitation contracts since the early 2000s under at least four different administrations, and Nigeria has remained a net importer of the very fuel it has the crude to produce. So forgive me if my applause is muted. What makes this particular round of assurances slightly different is that it comes packaged with an acknowledgment of past failure rather than a denial of it. Governments that admit what didn’t work are, at minimum, better positioned to avoid repeating it than governments still insisting everything is fine. That is a low bar, admittedly, but in the refinery saga, Nigerians have learned to take what they can get.
Where I find firmer ground is the Deep Offshore Oil and Gas Projects Incentives Order signed . This is the less glamorous story, the one that won’t trend on social media because it doesn’t involve queues at filling stations, but it may matter more for Nigeria’s economic future than anything said at the Villa during the week.For years, this country’s offshore oil wealth, the kind that funds Norway’s sovereign fund and transformed Guyana’s economy almost overnight, has sat largely untouched because investors could never be sure what rules would govern a project from one administration to the next. Every major offshore development turned into a bespoke negotiation, dragged out over years, with terms that changed depending on who was in the room. That uncertainty is precisely why Nigeria’s deep offshore basin, one of the most promising in West Africa, has underperformed its potential for two decades.
Replacing that project-by-project horse-trading with a transparent, rules-based framework, one that Special Adviser Olu Arowolo-Verheijen says is designed to maximise Nigerian fabrication, engineering and marine logistics jobs rather than simply exporting crude and importing everything else, is the kind of structural reform I have consistently argued this country needs. Not another dialogue. Not another committee. An actual rule that investors can read, understand and build a ten-year plan around.
If the Bonga South West project, valued at roughly ten billion dollars, becomes the first real test case of this framework, and if Nigerian companies genuinely get a meaningful slice of that fabrication and logistics work rather than the usual token local content box-ticking, this could be one of the more consequential economic decisions of this administration. Emphasis on “if.”
Consider the neighbours. Ghana’s Jubilee field and Guyana’s Stabroek block both attracted the kind of long-term capital Nigeria has struggled to lock down, not because their geology was necessarily superior, but because investors could price their risk with confidence. Nigeria, by contrast, has spent years watching international oil companies quietly redirect capital toward those very markets while our own offshore blocks sat undeveloped, tied up in negotiations that dragged on longer than some of the governments negotiating them.
A rules-based framework will not by itself reverse that trend overnight, but it removes the single biggest excuse investors have used to look elsewhere: the fear that today’s terms will not survive tomorrow’s cabinet reshuffle.
There is also something worth noting in how Tinubu framed the broader argument to NUPENG. He is right that a functioning economy is not child’s play, and that regular salary payments to civil servants ripple outward to market women and small businesses in ways that are easy to dismiss until you have lived through months of unpaid wages, as many Nigerian states have.
None of this means the road ahead is safe. CNG adoption remains lopsided, with truck owners pocketing benefits that were meant to reach commuters, by the President’s own admission. Refinery timelines in this country have a well-documented habit of sliding. And a transparent offshore investment framework is only as good as the institutions enforcing it, the same institutions Nigerians have learned, through bitter experience, not to take for granted.
So here is my honest scorecard. On the subsidy savings, I want to see the published figures before I hand out any applause. On the refineries, I want litres, not language. On the deep offshore framework, the architecture looks sound, and if executed with the local content discipline that has been promised, it could be the quiet reform Nigerians look back on in a decade as the one that actually worked. Credit where genuinely earned, scrutiny where still required. That, and not blind cheerleading, is what accountability journalism owes both this government and the Nigerians counting on it to deliver.
By Jonathan Nda-Isaiah