The Nigerian Association of Liquefied Petroleum Gas Marketers raised the alarm last week over what it described as a fast-deteriorating crisis in the cooking gas market. The numbers behind that alarm are stark. LPG is now selling at over N1,500 per kilogramme in many parts of the country, up from under N1,000 recently. Marketers are paying between N25.2 million and N26.2 million for 20 metric tonnes depending on location. For millions of households already stretched thin, those figures are not statistics. They are the difference between cooking on gas and going back to firewood.
That last part is the detail that deserves the most attention. Nigeria spent years and significant government resources convincing households to make the switch to cleaner cooking energy. That effort was not just about convenience. Firewood and charcoal carry real costs: respiratory illness, deforestation, and the disproportionate burden placed on women and children who spend hours collecting fuel. The clean energy transition was a genuine public health intervention, not just an energy policy.
Those gains are now under pressure. NALPGAM says households are already reverting to firewood and charcoal in some areas because cylinder refills have become unaffordable. Small LPG retail businesses are struggling to stay open. Food vendors and low-income families who built their daily operations around cooking gas are being squeezed from both the supply and price sides simultaneously.
The association points to a familiar set of problems: supply shortages at depots, logistics bottlenecks, rising operational costs, and insufficient domestic LPG allocation. These are not new complaints. They have surfaced before in this sector and have generally been met with temporary interventions that address the immediate pressure without fixing the underlying structure.
What is different this time is the context. Nigeria is in the middle of a broader energy cost crisis, with fuel prices already elevated and household budgets already strained. A simultaneous spike in cooking gas prices compounds the pressure in a way that is difficult for low-income families to absorb. The marketers’ warning that civil unrest around filling stations cannot be ruled out reflects how close to the edge parts of the market already are.
NALPGAM has called on the federal government, the petroleum ministry, the NMDPRA, and the NNPCL to coordinate an urgent response. The ask is not unreasonable: better domestic allocation, transparent distribution, reduced import bottlenecks, and investment in storage infrastructure. These are structural fixes that would take time to deliver but need to start somewhere.
The immediate question is whether the response will come before more households make the switch back to fuels that cost less at the pump but far more in other ways.
