President Bola Ahmed Tinubu met with the Governors’ Forum on Thursday, and by the time the meeting ended, Nigerians had a new date to circle on their calendars: 1 October 2026. That is the day, we are told, when transport fares nationwide are supposed to start coming down, on the strength of compressed natural gas and electric vehicles running cheaper than petrol ever could. Mind you, this is not a small promise in a country where the cost of getting from one’s home to one’s workplace has become, for millions of Nigerians, the single most painful line item in a monthly budget.
Let me start with what is genuinely encouraging here, because there is something to credit. According to the President, the governors did not need to be dragged to this position. He said they had, “on their own initiative, resolved to take immediate measures to bring down the cost of transportation in their states.” If that is accurate, and I will come back to that qualifier shortly, it represents a rare moment of federal and state governments actually rowing in the same direction on an issue that touches ordinary Nigerians daily, rather than trading blame across Abuja and the state capitals the way they usually do.
The numbers President Tinubu cited are worth putting on the record. More than 120,000 vehicles have been converted to CNG nationwide, with over 100,000 additional conversion kits already in the pipeline. The Midstream and Downstream Gas Infrastructure Fund is financing more than 100 gas projects, including 15 CNG mother stations and 86 daughter stations. Four of these were commissioned in Lagos, Abuja and Owerri back in May, including a 15-station refuelling network in Lagos and an Abuja facility the President says can serve 1,000 cars and tricycles, and 50 trucks and buses, a day. In addition to the 500 stations already ordered by the Fund, Tinubu has now directed a further 500, bringing the total planned rollout to 1,000 CNG refuelling stations nationwide. Whatever else one wants to say about this administration, it cannot be accused of failing to put a figure on its ambitions.
The economics, on paper, are sound. Tinubu said vehicles running on CNG spend between 60 and 80 per cent less on fuel than their petrol-powered counterparts. If that translates even partially into fares, a commercial bus operator in Kano or Port Harcourt saving that much on fuel should, in theory, be able to charge his passengers considerably less and still turn a profit.
The logic is not in dispute. The question, as always in this country, is execution.
And here is where I must be honest with my readers: a column that only cheers a government announcement without asking the hard questions is not journalism; it is public relations.
Nigerians have heard variations of this promise before. When the petrol subsidy was removed in 2023, we were told palliatives would cushion the pain. Many of those palliatives never reached the people they were meant for, and where they did, the impact was thin and short-lived. So when a President says fares will fall from a specific date because fuel costs less, the fair question to ask is: who exactly enforces that? The Federal Government does not set transport fares. State governments do not typically set them either, not in any direct sense. Fares in Nigeria are set, in practice, by transport unions, by the National Union of Road Transport Workers and its many local affiliates, by individual bus owners and drivers responding to their own costs and to what the market will bear on any given route on any given day. A CNG-powered bus that saves its owner sixty per cent on fuel has no legal or economic obligation to pass a single naira of that saving on to the woman standing at the bus stop in Wuse. Nothing in Thursday’s announcement tells us how that gap between cheaper fuel and cheaper fares is supposed to be closed.
To be sure, the President did address this directly, at least in principle. He said intra-state transport is “where Nigerians feel the cost most directly, and it is where the states hold the levers.” That is true, and it is precisely why the joint committee he announced, bringing together the Federal Government and the states to begin implementing these measures, matters more than the headline figures on stations and conversion kits.
A committee without enforcement teeth, without a transparent mechanism for tracking whether fares in Lagos, Kano, Enugu and Rivers actually fall after October 1, will be just another communique gathering dust, the way so many of our well-intentioned committees have gathered dust before it.
It is also worth remembering how we got here. This administration built its entire economic case on the argument that removing the subsidy and floating the naira would eventually free up resources for exactly this kind of structural investment, rather than the endless recurrent spending on fuel importation that swallowed trillions of naira every year under previous arrangements.
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If the CNG rollout genuinely represents subsidy savings being redirected into productive infrastructure, that is precisely the kind of trade-off the government promised Nigerians they would eventually see, even if the pain of the transition arrived well ahead of the gain. The test now is whether that gain, so long delayed, actually shows up where it was promised, which is in the pocket of the commuter, not merely in the ledger of the Midstream and Downstream Gas Infrastructure Fund.
There is also the question of who actually gets the conversion kits and who gets left out. With 120,000 vehicles converted and another 100,000 kits reportedly in the works, the distribution mechanism becomes as important as the numbers themselves. Nigerians have watched fuel subsidy schemes, fertiliser distribution schemes and intervention fund disbursements get captured by well-connected middlemen before the intended beneficiaries ever see them.
If the conversion kits and refuelling access end up concentrated among politically connected transport union chieftains rather than the ordinary commercial driver struggling to keep his tricycle on the road, the entire exercise will simply create a new class of CNG barons without moving the needle on what a market woman in Kano pays to get her goods to Main Market.
The Federal Government owes Nigerians clarity on how conversion access is being allocated, and the state governments, since they hold the levers on intra-state transport, owe an equal clarity on how they intend to monitor and, where necessary, compel fare adjustments once the infrastructure is in place.
None of this is an argument against the initiative itself, and God forbid anyone reads it that way. The infrastructure investment described here, the mother and daughter stations, the refuelling network, and the scale of vehicle conversion, is real, and it is substantial by any standard this country has set for itself on energy transition.
Nigeria’s problem has rarely been the absence of good policy on paper. Our problem has always been the gap between the policy document and what actually happens at the bus stop, the motor park, and the checkpoint where a transport union agent collects his daily toll, regardless of what fuel is in the tank.
So here is what I would want to see between now and 1 October, if this promise is to mean anything beyond a press statement. First, publish the fare benchmarks. The government should tell Nigerians, route by route or, at a minimum, state by state, what fares are expected to look like after the transition, so citizens have something concrete to hold operators to, rather than a vague promise of “lower fares.” Second, make the joint committee’s work public, not another closed-door federal-state affair whose only visible output is a photo opportunity. Third, be transparent about kit and station allocation, so the benefits do not simply enrich a new set of intermediaries. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, engage the transport unions directly and publicly, because no fare will fall by government decree alone if the men who actually collect money from passengers every morning have not been brought into the arrangement.
Nigerians have waited a long time for genuine relief on the cost of moving from one point to another in their own country. If October 1 delivers even a modest, verifiable reduction in what commuters pay, this government will have earned real credit, and I will be the first to say so on this page. But if the date comes and goes with fares unchanged while officials point to conversion numbers and station counts as proof of success, the public will rightly conclude that this was another well-produced announcement chasing a headline rather than a household budget. The infrastructure is being built. Whether ordinary Nigerians ever feel it in their pockets is an entirely separate question, and it is the only one that matters.
By Jonathan Nda-Isaiah