The Kwara-born politician made the assertion on Channels Television’s Politics Today on Friday. His figure stands in sharp contrast to the pump prices Nigerians have been paying since the subsidy removal under President Bola Tinubu took effect.
Olawepo-Hashim said the entire fuel subsidy debate was largely a product of how the government structured its accounting and crude oil pricing system. That framing, he argued, was the real driver of elevated pump prices, not the actual cost of production. He maintained that a proper reckoning of domestic crude costs would reveal a far more affordable baseline price than what Nigerians currently encounter at filling stations.
“Petrol could sell for about N605 per litre if the cost of locally produced crude oil and other associated expenses were properly calculated,” he said during the interview. The figure he cited is significantly below current market rates at filling stations across the country.
He did not stop at the numbers. Olawepo-Hashim also described the policy behind the subsidy removal as, in his direct framing, an act of institutional failure at the highest level of government.
“It is insanity and idiocy for anybody, especially for the president of an oil-producing country, to say that both domestic and international oil prices you leave to market forces,” he told the programme. The Accord Party chieftain directed that criticism squarely at Tinubu.
His position challenges the official narrative that the subsidy removal was a fiscally necessary and inevitable reform. For millions of Nigerians already adjusting to higher transport costs, food prices, and energy bills, the N605 figure raises a direct question: where exactly is the difference going.
Olawepo-Hashim, who has previously sought elective office at the presidential level, confirmed that Nigeria’s status as an oil-producing nation was central to his argument. A country that extracts crude domestically, he said, should not price its citizens out of the refined product. That principle, in his view, distinguishes Nigeria’s situation from nations that must import crude at full international market rates before refining and selling to their populations.
The politician described what he called Tinubu’s decision to surrender both domestic and international price-setting entirely to market forces. That decision, he said on Channels Television, amounted to policy failure that ordinary Nigerians are now absorbing at the pump.
No government official had responded to Olawepo-Hashim’s N605 claim as of the time of this report. The presidency and the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited have not issued any figures disputing or contextualising his calculation on domestic crude oil cost.
His comments arrive at a moment when petrol prices remain a live and contentious issue across Nigeria. Transport operators, commercial drivers, and low-income households have consistently identified fuel cost as the primary pressure point squeezing their finances since the subsidy exit.
The Accord Party chieftain did not provide a full breakdown of how he arrived at the N605 figure, beyond attributing it to proper calculation of locally produced crude oil costs and associated expenses. That gap in detail leaves his claim open to scrutiny.
Still, the specificity of his number adds weight to ongoing debates about the true cost of petrol production in Nigeria. No independent Nigerian energy economist or regulator has publicly confirmed or refuted the N605 figure cited by Olawepo-Hashim as of Friday.
For Nigerians filling up at stations where prices remain substantially above that threshold, the arithmetic carries a practical edge. Every naira above N605, under his framework, is a cost the government’s pricing model, not the market, has introduced. That framing shifts the question from whether subsidy removal was justified to whether the pricing methodology adopted in its wake accurately reflects what producing petrol in Nigeria actually costs.
Olawepo-Hashim’s intervention keeps the petrol price argument in the public conversation as Nigerians continue to navigate an economy reshaped, in large part, by what happens at the fuel pump.
