In September 2024, Aliko Dangote sat down with Bloomberg and said something that cut through all the noise around petrol prices in Nigeria. According to him, the fuel NNPCL bought from the Dangote Refinery on September 15th was priced 15 to 20 percent cheaper than what NNPC was paying to import fuel from abroad. Yet when NNPC announced the pump prices to the public, the figures presented did not reflect that reality.
Dangote's position was direct. He said NNPC bought the refinery's fuel at international price — the same standard they applied to imported fuel — but the locally refined product was still coming in cheaper than the imports when you compared the real numbers. His frustration was with the transparency of how NNPC communicated those prices publicly, suggesting the person who made the announcement either was not fully authorised or was not presenting the complete picture.
What made this significant was the timing. Nigeria had just gone through the trauma of subsidy removal under President Tinubu. Nigerians were already adjusting to fuel prices that had more than tripled overnight. The last thing the public needed was confusion from the very institutions meant to manage the transition. Dangote's comments suggested NNPC was blending the cost of cheaper local fuel with more expensive imports and selling everything at a single "basket price" — which meant consumers were not benefiting from the savings the refinery was supposed to deliver.
The price breakdown NNPC released at the time showed pump prices ranging from around ₦950 per litre in Lagos to over ₦1,019 in states like Borno, reflecting logistics and distribution costs by region. Dangote's point was not about those regional differences — it was about whether the base price being charged to Nigerians honestly reflected what it cost to produce and supply fuel from a local refinery versus flying it in from abroad.
Nearly two years later, fuel prices in Nigeria have continued to climb. The Dangote Refinery has since started supplying petrol to the domestic market in larger volumes, and the back-and-forth between the refinery and NNPC over pricing and naira payments eventually became one of the most talked-about business stories in Nigeria through 2024 and 2025. This September 2024 Bloomberg interview was where it all started becoming public.
Source: Bloomberg interview with Aliko Dangote, September 2024. Additional reporting via SaharaReporters.
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