Dangote, petrol prices, and the beauty of healthy competition

Dangote is not joking. This is the beauty of competition. We have seen it play out in the telecom sector and now in the oil sector. The next should be the power sector.

There was a time Nigerian mobile network subscribers were compelled to exhaust their recharge within a month. Worse still, they were charged per second even when the talk time was less than a minute. It was a wicked and arbitrary exploitation of subscribers. Econet and MTN were the chief culprits in those days, no mercy.

Then Glo Mobile entered the market and shattered that exploitation. By introducing per-second billing, it forced others to adjust. SIM card, that once sold for N20,000 or more, is almost free now. That's the benefit of a privatised market: it breeds healthy competition, so long as the government plays its core regulatory role without favouritism or corruption.

Today, despite the odds Dangote faces in the oil sector and the pushback from entrenched oil cabals, the price of petrol is gradually coming down.

Dangote’s partner filling stations are selling between ₦739 and ₦780, depending on proximity to the refinery, while NNPC-backed imported fuel is selling at ₦835 per litre. It is not just coming down; it is a price war. And in a price war, whoever wins controls the market, but the real winners are the masses. Simple.

If the government fears Dangote monopolising the oil sector, then it should put its four moribund refineries to work.

That same competitive energy is what the power sector needs. Not the cosmetic privatisation, not the padi-padi deal that followed the sale of PHCN, but a genuine one.

When that happens, customers should be able to switch from BEDC to Ikeja Electric if service delivery fails. That is how competition works. That is how efficiency is enforced.