Okpebholo fuel price comment comparing Nigeria to UK petrol costs has ignited fierce backlash — and he never mentioned minimum wage. Read what he said.
So a Nigerian governor walked into a filling station in London last week and came back with a conclusion that has since set the internet on fire.
Edo State Governor Monday Okpebholo, fresh from a UK trip, decided the fuel price conversation happening back home needed his voice in it. And what he brought back was this — Nigerians complaining about the cost of petrol should take a breath because in London, a litre of fuel costs over ₦3,000 after conversion. He said it like he was delivering good news. His exact words were we are enjoying here.
The Okpebholo fuel price comment left the room before he finished saying it and the reaction has not stopped since.
Because there is a number the governor visited London and somehow did not bring back with him. The United Kingdom national minimum wage as of 2024 is £11.44 per hour for workers aged 21 and above, according to the UK government’s own published figures. Convert that at the current exchange rate and you are looking at roughly ₦22,000 per hour. Not per day.
Per hour. Nigeria’s own minimum wage, the one that labour unions had to fight and threaten strike action to get reviewed, is ₦70,000 per month. The whole month. Thirty days. That is the number he left on the other side of the Atlantic when he was doing his fuel price comparison at that London filling station.
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That missing number is the entire point.
When someone in Britain pulls up to a pump and pays what converts to ₦3,000 per litre, they are doing it inside an economy that was built to hold them if things get hard. There is a public transport system so extensive that millions of Londoners genuinely do not own a car and do not need one.
Okpebholo fuel price comment
There is a national health service that does not ask you to bring your own blood before they treat you. There is a housing support structure, a welfare system, a social safety net with actual weight to it. The fuel price is one number sitting inside a much bigger picture that was designed with the ordinary person in mind. Okpebholo fuel price comment
In Nigeria the ordinary person is doing the math on everything at the same time. Fuel. Transport. Food. Rent. School fees. Generator. All of it going up. None of it going down. Okpebholo fuel price comment
And the income sitting underneath all of those rising numbers has not moved anywhere near fast enough to keep up. The World Bank has put over 40 percent of Nigerians below the poverty line. That is not a figure from a hostile foreign report written to embarrass anyone. That is just what the numbers say. Okpebholo fuel price comment
So when the governor stood somewhere and said we are enjoying, that word landed in the middle of all of that. And it landed badly.
It was not just what he said. It was how he said it. There was no acknowledgement that things are hard. No mention of what his administration is doing to make the hardship lighter for the people of Edo State. No context. Just a fuel price from a London forecourt and a conclusion that Nigerians should count themselves lucky. Okpebholo fuel price comment
The average Nigerian who cannot afford fuel is not catching a cab or an Uber instead. They are on a motorcycle in the rain hoping the rain stops before work does. They are calculating whether the danfo fare went up again this week. Okpebholo fuel price comment
They are standing at bus stops in cities where public transport is a generous description of what exists. The infrastructure that makes a high fuel price survivable in the UK simply does not exist here in any comparable way and a governor who travels internationally knows that or should know that. Okpebholo fuel price comment
Okpebholo’s office had not responded to the backlash or offered any additional context around the fuel price comment at the time this was written. NewsFlash NGR is watching for any statement and will update this as soon as something comes in.
But the conversation this comment started is not waiting for a response. It is already happening in the kind of language that tells you people are not just annoyed. They are exhausted. Tired of leaders who board a flight on Thursday, land in London or Dubai or Washington, and come back on Monday with a fresh perspective on why the people who stayed behind should stop complaining.
Something is broken between the people sitting in government and the people sitting in traffic trying to figure out how to make this month work. And comments like this one do not bridge that gap. They just make it more visible.
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