On January first, 2012, over here in Nigeria the subsidy for petrol was canceled due to the fact that there was no money for it in the budget. So now the fuel price went up from NGN 65 to NGN 138 and more. This is an increase of 112%, not bad, isn't it?

Strange enough is also the fact that Nigeria, as one of the bigger deployers of crude oil, has almost no functional refinery inside the country. All existing refineries are out of service due to lack of maintenance. Or maybe even due to politics. Because responsible for the import of fuel are relatives of the former president. And I bet they will take any effort to keep their business running instead of having the fuel produced in the own country.

On the other hand it is also interesting that a country that produces an average of 2 million barrels of crude oil a day has no money in their state's budget. I am asking myself where the oil money goes to then? At an average price of 100 US-Dollars per barrel Nigeria earns 200 million dollars a day, which is 6 billion dollars a month or 72 billion dollars a year. Even more when you consider the oil production to be above 2 million barrels a day.

But back to the topic. Due to the way of increasding fuel prices by over 100% from this Monday on people will go on strike to force the government to reduce prices again.

From my perspective it would have been more wise to increase the prices bit by bit, as already by April 2011 the president announced to kill the subsidy. Time was there enough, only the brain was missing.