Marindoti Oludare

By Marindoti Oludare

The battle between Aliko Dangote and Nigeria’s oil regulators (fraud allegations, denials, and media frenzy) has dominated public discourse for the past week. In this simplified narrative, Dangote is cast as a noble whistleblower standing up to a recalcitrant state, while regulators are portrayed as saboteurs of national progress.

That story is as compelling as it is incomplete.

While Ahmed Farouk may have been justifiably pushed to resign amid controversy, the matter before Nigeria goes far beyond graft or regulatory personalities. What is unfolding is a deeper struggle over market openness, monopoly power, and the persistent Nigerian temptation to replace competition with protection.

Dangote, the Courts, and Market Power

This is not Dangote’s first legal confrontation with the Nigerian state. He once took Nigeria to court over its failure to collect taxes from Ibeto Cement. More recently, he sued the current government over alleged non-compliance with the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) — irrespective of whether his influence shaped parts of that very framework.

Whatever one thinks of those suits, the pattern is consistent: these are not purely moral crusades; they are strategic battles over market structure and advantage.

None of this is illegitimate. Litigation is a lawful tool. But the pattern matters. Dangote’s engagements with government are rarely about free markets; they are about favourable markets. The current refinery dispute fits squarely within that tradition.

From flour to fuel: the same economic idea

In an attempt to argue in favor of oil import restriction, Dangote told us during his press conference that if Nigeria allows flour importation, flour could land cheaper than wheat (despite Nigeria losing 100 children every hour to starvation, according to UNICEF). The contrasting reality captures the philosophy now hovering over the oil debate: if imports are cheaper, block them; if competition threatens domestic margins, restrict it; if prices rise, baptize it as patriotism — all while the masses bear the unthinkable brunt of the policy outcome.

This idea is not new — and it has failed everywhere it has been tried.

Adam Smith, the Corn Laws, Charles Dickens, and the lesson Nigerians already know

In 1776, Adam Smith warned that policy must prioritize consumers over protected producers: “The interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.”

In 1815, Britain ignored that principle under the Corn Laws — taxes and restrictions designed to protect grain producers. The result was the kind of social misery Nigerians recognize from the portrayals in Charles Dickens’ novels: Oliver Twist, Hard Times, Bleak House, David Copperfield. Protection did not create dignity. It created squalor.

By 1846, following the repeal of the Corn Laws, the outcome mattered: food prices fell, wages rose in real terms, and economic growth accelerated, strengthening Great Britain sufficiently to become an industrial and imperial power, extending control over territories such as Nigeria.

Why refining is not an “infant industry”

Some will argue: “Protect it for a while; let it grow.” That infant-industry argument fails here for structural reasons:

* Input price is globally set. Crude prices are benchmarked internationally, and supply discipline is heavily influenced by OPEC+ decisions. Nigeria cannot protect its way into cheaper crude.

* Technology is mature and standardized. Refining is not a new learning-by-doing frontier; it is a global commodity business where efficiency is measurable.

* Market discipline is immediate. Energy products are universally needed; inefficiency shows up quickly in prices, shortages, and fiscal stress.

Even in the “best practice” examples of temporary protection (like South Korea’s industrial policy), key performance metrics were strictly enforced and export pressure sustained as a condition for protection. And yet, prolonged distortions and overleveraging were part of the vulnerability that exploded during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis (the lesson: protection can let inefficiencies survive far longer than they should).

Latin America tried a different intellectual cover for the same instinct and learned the lesson painfully. Dependencia theory, which justified import substitution and state control of strategic sectors, did not deliver the promised self-reliance and development; it instead delivered stagnation and inflation. The outcome was scarcity, macroeconomic instability, state capture, and institutional decay.

The FX, Unemployment and Price argument Nigeria is getting backwards

A serious pro-restriction talking point is: “We need import restrictions to save our precious FX, end importation of unemployment and bring down prices.” Economically, these are backwards in three key ways:

FX stability improves with net FX inflows, not with monopoly. If Dangote exports refined products that are not sold locally, that can generate FX without requiring Nigeria to ban competing imports (according to Dangote himself, export is cheaper for him than import due to Nigeria’s excessive tax overheads). In other words, export competitiveness stabilizes FX; import bans merely hide FX problems until they return as scarcity and inflation.

“Importers are Nigerians too.”

The downstream import ecosystem is owned by Nigerians, employs Nigerians, pays Nigerian taxes, uses Nigerian logistics, and supports Nigerian retail distribution. When policy begins to treat one Nigerian as more deserving of protection than others, we drift into the very contradiction George Orwell warned against in Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

No Nigerian is more Nigerian than another Nigerian. Replacing a competitive network with a protected near-monopoly doesn’t just eliminate employment; it also redistributes rents. Profits that were previously dispersed across hundreds of firms and thousands of workers become concentrated upstream in one dominant, vertically integrated structure.

The protected firm may still employ Nigerians, but their wages will fall due to monopsony, the broader economy loses far more jobs indirectly as higher fuel prices suppress demand across transport, food distribution, manufacturing, and services.

Competition ensures FX and oil price pass-through. In a competitive import environment, when global costs fall or the naira appreciates, consequent price reductions have a fighting chance to reach consumers. Under monopoly, the incentive is asymmetric: when crude prices rise or the naira depreciates, fuel prices rise quickly; when crude prices fall or the naira appreciates, oil prices most likely will not fall because there is no rival forcing the reductions. The informational role of the price system is therefore lost.

Plato’s Cave: why “educating Nigerians” becomes hardest exactly here

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave explains why many Nigerians oppose marketers trying to compete with Dangote, regardless of the unspoken burden they quietly know they must bear. Applying Occam’s razor, if Dangote could guarantee constant cheaper oil, why is he fighting to prevent the importation of more expensive oil?

Socrates describes prisoners mistaking shadows for reality because they have never been taught otherwise. When one escapes and returns with truth, he is ridiculed and rejected.

Nigeria today suffers from policy illiteracy masquerading as patriotism. In Nigeria’s political economy, the “shadows” are slogans:

• “Protection equals patriotism.”
• “Competition equals sabotage.”
• “One champion equals national pride.”

When a society internalizes these shadows, meaningful economic education becomes difficult, not because Nigerians lack intelligence, but because they’ve never seen the alternative. Hence, out of sight; out of mind. A population taught to cheer scarcity cannot reason through policy trade-offs. And a society that cannot reason cannot hold power accountable, that’s when democracy becomes vulnerable to manipulation.

Energy restrictions can break democracy—quickly

Nigeria must recognize a critical distinction: oil is not rice, flour, sugar, or cement. While food scarcity kills quietly and insidiously, fuel scarcity detonates with a bang.

Venezuela’s politicization and control of energy rents helped corrode institutions and democratic competition. Argentina’s cycles of energy controls and subsidy distortions fed fiscal stress and recurring instability. Sri Lanka’s fuel shortages and macroeconomic crisis accelerated political collapse. Different contexts, same warning: when energy becomes a controlled choke-point, politics destabilizes fast.

Nigeria is no stranger to this dynamic. In the early 1980s, as economic conditions worsened, the Shagari government introduced austerity and controls, including import restrictions and licensing.

Those controls (expanded and weaponized) helped create the economic and social conditions that preceded the collapse of the Second Republic and the military takeover on 31 December 1983, ushering in the Buhari regime in 1984, all while simultaneously enriching a narrow class of elites (like Dangote et al.) who benefited immensely from restricted access to import licenses.

So when Nigerians flirt with the idea of restricting fuel imports to protect a single refinery, they are not debating a business plan. They are playing with the kind of scarcity lever that can unravel democratic governance.

The sensible conclusion

Farouk Ahmed is not Dangote’s problem. Competition is. And competition is exactly what Nigeria must protect — especially in energy.

Let Dangote refine. Let him price competitively. Let him export. Let him win by efficiency, not by exclusion.

And let regulators regulate, without becoming tools for private insulation. Government can end unreasonable charges and fees that strain Dangote’s oil business, but the refinery must compete, lest we all collapse.

* Dr. Oludare, a Nigerian born, US-based medic and sociopolitical analyst, writes from Texas.