The Nigerian finance minister, Zainab Ahmed, reported this year that the country spends 118 percent of its revenue on servicing its debt... the government will stop subsidizing petrol consumption for ordinary Nigerians in 2023.

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) continue to exploit resources in the neocolonial world. It is not only that developed countries still play host to wealth looted during the colonial period. It’s that African wealth is currently serving to stabilize international financial institutions in Europe and the United States.

It is criminal that the ruling elite in Nigeria presides over an arrangement where, for every single dollar this country makes, it has to send $1.18 abroad. We have a ruling class that sacrifices the needs of the people — jobs, electricity, health services — in order to meet the greed of international finance capital.

When the current ruler, Muhammadu Buhari, came to power, he announced that the petrol subsidy was a scam and a fraud. Now that he’s in power, he presides over the subsidy regime. It’s really a subsidy for the ruling class, providing them opportunities to appropriate as much wealth as possible from the coffers of the state. It ensures they’ll never work to diversify the economy.

Nigeria, an economy dominated by oil, doesn’t have a single functional refinery because the ruling elites refuse to build any. Nigerians have to buy petrol for use at the international market rate! All of this is why the working class has consistently demonstrated its clear opposition to deregulation and privatization of the key sectors of the economy.

This piece helps to explain how it works:

...as we can now appreciate, while colonialism had changed its disguises, it never went away. Colonies are the geese that lay golden eggs for western financial and corporate interests who can't and won't easily let go of their stranglehold on these sources of wealth. Instead, they changed the mechanism of colonial exploitation from outright occupation and hands-on management of mines and plantations to a debt-based exploitation.

In 1824, the French offered Haitians a new deal: we'll recognize your independence, but you must pay us reparations. Haitians had no money with which to pay reparations, so they were forced to borrow those sums from French bankers. Haiti would take the next 130+ years paying off that debt to French bankers from the proceeds of their exports.

The magnitude of this extortion was such that it left Haiti, as well as other colonies in crushing and chronic poverty in spite of their extraordinary resource wealth. Under this arrangement, it was no longer necessary for French managers to whip slaves, manage the sugar and coffee plantations or port operations. The indebted governments would police all these operations themselves to make sure they could repay the nation's debts.

Obedient officials could always count on their rewards with houses and apartments, bank accounts, luxury cars and yachts as well as accolades at the colonial mother-ships in London, Paris, Bruxelles, New York and elsewhere in the "civilized" world. These cooperative, obedient officials became the key node of the new-and-improved neocolonialist order. They were best placed to know the local cultures and navigate the political process necessary to optimize the oppression of their own countrymen.

But this also made them vulnerable to rebellion or assassination so they would have to be protected, which is why protecting human rights in colonized nations had to rely on French, British or American military bases.