The former Minister of Education, Oby Ezekwesili, described the removal of the petrol subsidy as a crucial policy that was executed improperly.

She made the remarks on Monday at the 2025 Nigerian Bar Association general conference in Enugu State.

The former minister criticized the reform, saying it lacked proper preparation and describing President Bola Tinubu’s declaration that the “subsidy is gone” as an act of “braggadocio.”

“As rightly said, the subsidy was skewing factors of production for us as an economy,” she said.

“Now realigning those prices was important but guess what? Doing it the wrong way was going to create the kind of distortionary effect that then became the galloping state of inflation that subsequently followed.”

Ezekwesili noted that while adjusting production factors through proper pricing was essential, the reforms were executed in a way that “missed the boat.”

“The second thing was this matter of the petroleum pricing. What we normally advise because liberalising and getting market pricing of a commodity like that to be appropriate actually does need to happen. Otherwise it skews the economy.

“But what would normally happen is that you would make sure that you have prepared for that reform. That reform was not prepared for.

“So what we ended up in that situation was a good reform done in the wrong way and because that good reform was done in the wrong way, it signalised to every other economic type of decisions that citizens had to make and it threw the economy into the inflationary situation that we have found,” Ezekwesili stated.

She warned that the situation was dire, noting that inflation hits the most vulnerable members of society the hardest.

“When we train in economic policy, you really have to prepare for reforms. I think that there was a braggadocio that was behind that whole “subsidy is gone”,” Ezekwesili added.