By Emmanuel Omolayo
Initially, most students did not overthink it; it was easy to absorb mentally. The price of kerosene went up against the rule of gravitational force. Most students across the halls of residence adjusted to this update. As a hostelite, you can’t switch, you can’t opt out, you just grumble, you pay, you move on, or you don’t cook. But then, the price keeps skyrocketing. This time, there was a shift, a quiet but popular one. No protest, no petition, no noise. Just a collective compromise spreading across the halls of residence like a slow leak: the stove can wait. Nevertheless, there was yet another dimension of hike in the price of kerosene. It went up a third time!
This hike cuts deeper than most. One fact about cooking in UI halls of residence is that there is only one legal option. Gas use is an anticipated reality. The university permits only kerosene as a cooking fuel for its residential students. Any other is declared illegal and may attract a penalty. This means that every student who wants to cook must walk to the shop in their hall and pay whatever price is current. There is no close-by competitor with a lower price or a need for any negotiation. That price, as of today, is ₦3,600 per litre and ₦1,800 for a bottle. It was not always this way. Not long ago, that same bottle was going for ₦1400, which is quite expensive but manageable, the kind you could factor into your monthly budget and still survive. The increment quickly continued in days, one after another, until ₦1400 became a distant memory and ₦1,800 became the current normal. It’s the same fuel, it’s the same bottle. A sharp increase in price for the same quantity.
At first, cooking in the halls followed a logic that made sense on a regular student budget. You spent #700 on kerosene, added roughly ₦1,000 on ingredients, and prepared a pot of food that could sustain you through two to three meals. Breakfast covered, lunch sorted, and dinner is already waiting. It was not cheap, but it was efficient, the closest thing a student allowance could afford. But that logic has since collapsed. At ₦1,800 for a bottle of kerosene, the cost of simply lighting the stove has made cooking the more expensive option. For example, three wraps of fufu, a piece of meat, and a chilled sachet of water is a complete meal from any canteen or food vendor on campus and would cost ₦1,000 at most, that is, ₦800 less than what it now costs to buy kerosene alone. The hike has done something almost absurd; presently, buying food is now cheaper than making it. On a student budget, that is not ironic; it’s a structural problem. And yet, if you conclude that students should simply stop cooking and buy their meals instead, then something important has been missed already. “You can’t be sure of the hygiene or quality of the food,” says Victor, a student at Bello Hall. “You can cook a large quantity of meal that can last two or three times instead of spending ₦1,000 on a meal that finishes immediately.”
This is what the price comparison ignores. Cooking in the halls was never completely a financial decision. It was about control over what goes into your food, over how much you eat and when you eat it. A pot of food carefully made in your room with clean utensils and water never ends when the money does. It remains at midnight when hunger checks in. It’s there all day long at critical times when the allowance has run thin. It carries the quiet confidence of knowing your own kitchen, your own ingredients, your own standard of cleanliness. Moreso, at the canteen, wanting more means paying more. At ₦3,600 per litre, that freedom, the freedom to eat on your own terms, has become a luxury with conditions. And what goes first after a student’s budget is pressured? The luxury.
What has replaced cooking does not look like a crisis. It looks like an adjustment, the kind that happens quietly and without clamouring. Some students now get their three-square meals from canteens and food vendors more often than before, while others walk around with raw ingredients looking for that kind neighbour who could lend out an active stove, one with kerosene in it. And at the end of that chain, after the food money is gone and that kind neighbour becomes more self-loving, there is instant garri, cold water poured over dried cassava flakes, either with groundnut and sugar or not, for some, a pinch of salt will do the magic. Often eaten in the kind of silence that needs no explanation. Garri has become the punctuation mark at the end of a hard day.
Nevertheless, not every student has stopped cooking. Some are still buying kerosene, still lighting the stove, still managing at the expense of an allowance that is already suffocated by a single luxury. The price hike is causing inconvenience amongst the student populace. What makes this situation particularly uncomfortable is not just the price; it is the absence of alternatives. Normally, a price hike would force a rethink; you would find another supplier or switch to a different product and adapt in a certain new way. But here, there is really nowhere to turn. The university’s policy shuts every other door. Kerosene is not a choice; it is a confinement. And within, the price is set by whoever runs the shop in the hall. There has been no official response addressing the hike, except a communiqué from the university administration, indicating that students would be allowed to use gas as a cooking fuel in two weeks. The shops remain open. The bottles remain filled and ready for sale. And the price remains what it is.
On a campus where kerosene, the only legal flame, is unaffordable is not a minor inconvenience. It is a day-to-day reality that shows up not in protest, noise or clamour, but in empty clean pots, borrowed and/or stoves, and cups of garri eaten alone at the end of a long day. The fire is still burning in some halls of residence. In many others, you rarely see flames; it has quietly snoozed out in quiet conclusion, a soft, unremarkable sound of a student deciding that tonight, the stove is simply not worth it. That sound is loud enough for the deaf to hear, clear enough for the blind to see, repeated across every hall of residence on campus.
