By Daniel Nduka Okonkwo
There is something deeply revealing about the way some Nigerian leaders discuss the rising cost of living: the price of an item is placed before the income of the person struggling to afford it. When Edo State Governor Monday Okpebholo points to the higher price of petrol in Britain as evidence that Nigerians are doing well, the bigger issue is not the arithmetic of the pump price, but the distance between political leadership and the daily economic reality of ordinary Nigerians. For a worker earning the national minimum wage, every litre of petrol represents hours of labour, while for millions of households, fuel costs affect transportation, electricity, food, and virtually every other basic necessity. To compare prices without acknowledging that burden risks turning a painful economic reality into a statistic and revealing just how insensitive leadership can appear when it loses sight of what an hour of a poor worker’s labour is actually worth.
Edo State Governor Monday Okpebholo’s claim that Nigerians are enjoying petrol prices because a litre costs over three thousand naira in the United Kingdom has done more than trigger public mockery. It has exposed a fundamental problem with comparing prices across countries without comparing the incomes of the people who have to pay them.
Speaking on Thursday, September 24, 2026, during the Operation Rescue Benin-Asaba Road event in Edo State, Okpebholo recounted visiting London the previous week and checking petrol prices with a friend. After converting the British price into naira, he said it worked out to over three thousand naira per litre, compared with roughly one thousand four hundred naira in Nigeria. He then declared that Nigerians were doing very well and praised President Bola Tinubu’s economic management.
On the narrow arithmetic of the nominal pump price, the governor is not wrong. Petrol is substantially more expensive per litre in Britain when its price is converted into naira. But that is where a meaningful economic comparison should begin, not where it should end.
Petrol is not bought with an exchange rate. It is bought with income, and that is the distinction the governor’s comparison overlooks.
From April 2026, the UK’s National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and above is £12.71 an hour. At an exchange rate of roughly ₦1,754 to £1 on September 25, 2026, that is approximately ₦22,300 for one hour of work.
Nigeria’s national minimum wage is ₦70,000 a month. Using a standard 160-hour working month, that works out to approximately ₦437.50 per hour.
The contrast is enormous. A British minimum-wage worker earns roughly ₦22,300 in one hour when the statutory wage is converted into naira, while a Nigerian worker earning the statutory minimum wage earns approximately ₦437.50 in that same hour. One hour of British minimum-wage labour is therefore worth roughly 51 times one hour of Nigerian minimum-wage labour, a gap that a simple currency conversion hides completely.
Consider what it actually takes to buy one litre of petrol. Current NNPC pricing puts petrol at approximately ₦1,385 per litre in Lagos and ₦1,430 in Abuja, with independent stations sometimes charging closer to ₦1,450. A Nigerian worker earning ₦437.50 an hour needs approximately 3.17 to 3.43 hours of labour to buy a single litre, depending on the station.
A British worker earning £12.71 an hour, by contrast, needs roughly three and a half to four minutes of work to earn the naira equivalent of that same ₦1,385 to ₦1,430 litre of Nigerian petrol, using the current exchange rate. This is not a suggestion that British workers travel to Nigeria to buy fuel. It is a purchasing-power illustration, and it reframes the real question. The issue was never simply how much a litre of petrol costs. It is how much of a worker’s labour is required to buy it.
The comparison becomes even clearer when Nigerian petrol is expressed in pounds. At the stated exchange rate, petrol priced between ₦1,385 and ₦1,430 per litre in Nigeria works out to roughly £0.79 to £0.82. A worker earning the UK’s statutory minimum wage would need only about three and a half to four minutes to earn that amount, and in a single hour would earn enough to buy roughly fifteen and a half to sixteen litres of Nigerian petrol.
There is a second way to see the Nigerian side of this equation. A worker on the ₦70,000 minimum wage, working eight hours a day for twenty days a month, earns approximately ₦3,500 a day. One litre of petrol at current prices consumes between roughly 40 and 43 percent of that entire day’s gross earnings, meaning more than three hours of a full working day go toward affording a single litre.
The gap widens further at the level of a full tank. Filling a standard fifty-litre tank in Nigeria costs between ₦69,250 and ₦75,000, depending on the price per litre. At ₦1,430, that figure is ₦71,500, which is already more than the entire monthly national minimum wage. At stations charging around ₦1,500, filling the same tank would cost approximately ₦75,000. A worker on that wage, therefore, cannot fill a fifty-litre tank with a full month’s gross statutory earnings.
There is also a structural difference that the governor’s comparison ignores. In Britain, petrol is primarily a transport cost, cushioned by extensive public rail and bus networks. In Nigeria, where the national grid remains unreliable, petrol is also an operating cost, powering the generators that businesses, hospitals, and households depend on simply to function.
When petrol prices rise in Nigeria, the effect does not stop at the pump. It moves into transport fares, into the cost of running a shop, into the movement of food and goods, and eventually into the prices consumers pay for nearly everything. When fuel becomes more expensive, businesses that rely on vehicles and generators also face higher operating costs. A pump-price comparison that leaves all of this out is not measuring affordability in any meaningful sense, and correct arithmetic used to support an incomplete argument does not make that argument economically sound. Reuters reported in September that rising petrol prices had renewed cost-of-living pressure in Nigeria, with petrol selling at around ₦1,400 per litre in Lagos and Abuja and reaching about ₦1,500 in parts of northern Nigeria.
But the central economic argument does not depend on that certificate. A public official who tells citizens they are enjoying fuel prices on the strength of one converted foreign figure, without considering wages, work hours, or purchasing power, has made a claim that can be tested independently of his academic history, and when tested against the numbers, that claim is difficult to sustain.
The same applies to the governance side of the criticism. A leader governing in an environment where the statutory minimum wage cannot buy a fifty-litre tank of petrol should recognise the enormous gap between citizens’ incomes and the cost of basic economic activity. That gap is not erased by pointing to a more expensive pump price in another country.
A higher nominal British petrol price does not demonstrate that Nigerians are better off. It demonstrates only that petrol carries different nominal prices in two economies. The meaningful question is what proportion of a citizen’s income each price consumes, and on that measure, the comparison tells a very different story.
Those numbers are straightforward. A British worker on the statutory minimum wage earns approximately ₦22,300 for an hour of work, while a Nigerian worker on the ₦70,000 monthly statutory minimum wage earns approximately ₦437.50 in that same hour. The British worker earns the equivalent of ₦1,385 to ₦1,430, roughly the current Nigerian petrol price in Lagos and Abuja, in about three and a half to four minutes. The Nigerian worker needs more than three hours to earn enough for that same litre.
The question Nigerians should be asking is therefore not whether petrol carries a higher sticker price in London. It is why a comparison built on that foreign price tag is being presented as proof that Nigerians are doing very well, when the purchasing-power arithmetic tells a substantially different story. The issue was never the price of petrol in London. It is the value of an hour of a Nigerian worker’s life at home.
Daniel Nduka Okonkwo is an investigative journalist, human rights advocate, and policy analyst based in Nigeria. He is the founder and publisher of Profiles International Human Rights Advocate (PIHRA), a platform documenting the courage of human rights defenders and examining issues of governance, accountability, security, and fundamental rights.
His reporting on Nigerian governance, security-sector accountability, public finance, and human rights has appeared in Sahara Reporters, Vanguard, Daily Trust, African Defence Forum, Opinion Nigeria, and Daily Intel.
Read more of his work on the PIHRA website:
https://www.profilesinternationalhumanrightsadvocate.com.ng/
For tips, feedback, or collaboration, contact him at dan.okonkwo.73@gmail.com.
