By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Take a Toyota Camry to a filling station in Ado Ekiti at dawn. Fill the tank, point the bonnet towards Abuja, and keep a notebook on the passenger seat. By the time you return, you will have written the most honest economic report in Nigeria, and no statistician in Aso Rock can argue with it.
The Camry is the right witness. It is the car of the Nigerian middle class: the civil servant, the lecturer, the pastor, the trader who has finally arrived. When the Camry becomes a dream, the middle class has been abolished.
THE CAR
Start with a price nobody can dispute. When the 2025 Toyota Camry went on sale in the United States, the base LE model started at 29,495 dollars. Toyota sets that figure in America. What a Nigerian pays for that same dollar sum is decided in Abuja, by what the naira is worth.
In June 2023, only weeks into this administration, the Central Bank moved every exchange rate onto a willing buyer, willing seller basis and dropped the old official rate. That was the new government’s own policy, meant to reveal the naira’s true value. On 30 June 2023 the naira closed at 769.25 to the dollar at the official window, with the black market rate at 770. At that true value, 29,495 dollars cost about 22.7 million naira.
On 11 September 2026 the official rate stood at 1,329.44 naira to the dollar. The same 29,495 dollars now costs about 39.2 million naira. That is 16.5 million naira more for the same dollars, measured from the rate his own policy set, before a kobo of freight, duty or clearing.
For a worker on the 70,000 naira minimum wage, 39.2 million naira is about 47 years of pay.
No peg to blame, no predecessor to accuse. From his own starting line, the same dollars now cost 16.5 million naira more.
THE PUMP
The first entry in the notebook is at the pump.
The National Bureau of Statistics put the average retail price of petrol at 257.12 naira per litre in January 2023, four months before he took office. Filling a 60-litre Camry tank then cost about 15,427 naira. The minimum wage was 30,000 naira, so one full tank took about half of a worker’s legal monthly pay.
Now look at the pump today. As of 13 September 2026, filling stations in major cities were selling petrol at between 1,400 and 1,450 naira per litre. The same 60 litres cost between 84,000 and 87,000 naira, while the minimum wage signed in July 2024 is 70,000 naira. One tank now costs more than a full month’s legal wage.
Even before prices climbed again this year, the litre stood around 830 naira, more than 3 times the January 2023 average. In May 2026 the NBS recorded a record national average of 1,596.25 naira per litre.
Now make the journey. Ado Ekiti to Abuja and back is roughly 900 kilometres. A Camry covers about 10 to 13 kilometres per litre, and on these roads you should count on the lower end, so budget about 90 litres.
In January 2023, that fuel cost about 23,141 naira. Today, at 1,400 naira a litre, it costs 126,000 naira. The car is the same and the road is the same, but the fuel bill is more than 5 times higher, and 1.8 times the national minimum wage, before a single meal on the way.
The government’s own Chief of Staff has conceded the point. In June 2026 Femi Gbajabiamila said the 70,000 naira wage no longer matched economic realities and would have to be reassessed. The worker did not need a summit in Abuja to discover that. He discovered it at the pump.
On 29 May 2023 he said subsidy is gone. What went with it was the Nigerian’s right to travel.
THE ROAD
Past Omuo and Ayere, the notebook stops recording prices and starts recording danger.
On 13 April 2026, gunmen attacked a Chisco Transport bus on the Ayere-Kabba road as it travelled from Lagos to Abuja. Further along, six senior directors of the Federal Ministry of Defence were kidnapped on the Kabba-Lokoja highway on their way from Lagos to Abuja for a promotion examination, an abduction the Office of the Head of the Civil Service condemned in November 2025. If the state cannot protect its own senior officials on this corridor, the ordinary Camry owner can draw his own conclusion.
Beyond Lokoja, the highway to the President’s own capital has become a trap. This month passengers and motorists were stranded for days on the Lokoja-Abuja highway, with the gridlock blamed on the road’s deplorable state, ongoing repairs and a crash at Bada, and frustrated travellers abandoned their vehicles to trek long distances. Motorcycle riders charged as much as 6,000 naira a head to cross the River Niger Bridge. Some of the stranded had set out from Kaduna for Imo State.
The ordeal repeats itself. Last December, a resident of Magajia boarded at Zuba for Lokoja at 9,000 naira instead of the usual 6,000, and was caught in the lockdown at Gegu. That same month, a traveller reached Lokoja by 10am, sat stuck under the sun until evening, and was told by his driver to stop at Kabba because the next stretch was dangerous after midnight. Motorists report potholes, uneven shoulders and half-finished carriageways around Koton Karfe and Banda. [Passengers trapped in Abuja–Lokoja Road gridlock.
This is the road on which the Camry owner is told to be patient.
THE MECHANIC
The road sends its invoice to the workshop.
Every crater at Koton Karfe is a shock absorber. Every diversion onto a dusty shoulder is a tyre, a wheel alignment and a set of brake pads. Most of it is imported: filters, pads, bearings and tyres cross the ocean priced in dollars. Each one now costs about 73 per cent more in naira than when his float began.
Transport unions confirm it. They say maintenance, spare parts, tyres and engine oil have kept rising, which is why fares will not come down even when pump prices dip. The Camry owner pays twice: once at the mechanic, and again in the fares and prices of everything that moves by road.
THE KITCHEN
The driver who survives the journey comes home to a kitchen that tells the same story.
The NBS put the average cost of refilling a 12.5kg cooking gas cylinder at 9,162.11 naira in July 2023, his second month in office. By April 2026 the same refill averaged 22,380 naira. That is nearly two and a half times as much, for the flame that cooks the family meal.
So the car is out of reach, the tank eats the wage, the road eats the car, and the gas eats the kitchen. This is how a middle class is dismantled. There was no single decree, only a long, slow bleed at the pump, the workshop and the stove.
THE RECKONING
Put the notebook down and read it back.
In January 2023, a salaried Nigerian could keep a Camry on the road, drive to Abuja and back on a tank and a half, and still feed his household. In September 2026 he parks the car, sells it to settle debts, or joins the crush at the motor park, where he pays a fare swollen by the same fuel, the same parts and the same broken highway.
A government that turns the family car into a museum piece has not reformed the economy. It has repossessed the middle class.
The ADC candidate, Atiku Abubakar, has named welfare and security as the first two duties of his government. Both are measured on this very road: the fare a family can afford and the journey it survives. On 16 January 2027, every Nigerian who has sat in that Lokoja gridlock walks into the polling unit with a notebook of his own. Read it, then vote.
123 days to go.
#TheCamryTest #Atiku2027 #16January2027 #ADC
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
16 September 2026
