Nigeria’s gasoline price cap hurting industry, costing economy

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Dr Ibe Kachikwu, Minister of State for Petroleum Resources

Nigeria must remove its gasoline price cap to prevent shortages, enable investment and keep the government from using valuable resources to import fuel, delegates at the OTL Expo in Lagos said on Wednesday.

Gasoline is a highly charged subject in Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil exporter. President Muhammadu Buhari last year raised the top gasoline price to 145 naira ($0.4603) per litre, a 67 percent hike, but did not remove a cap for fear of hurting low-income people.

Other African oil producers such as Ghana and Angola used the downturn in oil prices to remove caps or lower subsidies. [bit.ly/2iAaclD ]

Reginald Stanley, chairman of the OTL advisory board and former head of Nigeria’s Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency, said that pricing is now the “single most important” contributor to what he called…

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