LAGOS: Bisola Edun's electricity generator sits outside her small Lagos fashion shop and factory, noisily churning out heat and fumes for five hours every day. It is just one of an estimated 160m such machines across Nigeria roughly one per person in Africa's top oil economy.

Guzzling $1,200 worth of diesel each month, Edun's generator is an unavoidable expense in a country that produces only 40 watts of power for each inhabitant enough to run a single vacuum cleaner among 25 citizens.

'It seems normal to us, but looking at the amount I spend ever year on the generator alone, I just think Jesus Lord! If I could spend that amount on stock I'd be in a very good place,' she said.

As Edun prepared to re-open her shop for the first time since Nigeria was convulsed by the biggest protests in its history, she hoped things would change for the better, but admitted: 'From where I stand now, I'm not terribly optimistic.

When the government abruptly announced on Jan 1 an end to subsidies that kept fuel prices around $0.40 a litre, it hoped to fix the country's manybasic infrastructure problems.

Crumbling power plants would be revamped, potholed roads smoothed and the education system fixed if the 'cancer' in the form of the $6bn fuel subsidy was removed, said the president, Goodluck Jonathan.

Economists and multinational organisations, such as the International Monetary Fund, have long said such painful shock-therapy economics are necessary if Nigeria is to haul itself into the middle-income bracket. But the overnight doubling of petrol prices unleashed years of festering anger and the ensuing eight days of strikes brought much of the country to a halt.

The protests coincided with a fresh campaign of attacks by the militant Islamic group Boko Haram in the north of the country, and after a week in which Nigeria appeared to be teetering on the brink of disaster, the government was forced to back down, agreeing once again to use its vast oil wealth to cap prices. The move was enough to make trade unions call off a plan to stop oil production, but analysts say the root causes underlying the outrage remain.

Despite pumping 2m barrels of oil daily, decades of top-level mismanage-ment have left four national refineries barely functional, forcing Nigeria to import refined fuel that is then sold at around half the market rate to citizens.

A bloated civil service and entrenched patronage system mean there is no way of controlling where the money flows.

Meanwhile, a bill aimed at streamlining the labyrinthine oil sector has languished for decades.

'People cannot believe that the government will not just use the money to line their own pockets,' said financial consultant Hamar Kamza. 'They removed the diesel subsidy a few years back and nothing improved. Before that, they removed the kerosene subsidies and nothing changed at all.

'The same problems will keep coming back until the patronage system is broken,' he added.

Petrol sales resumed on Tuesday, but most Nigerians believe there will be fresh strikes soon. At a filling station in the choked commercial capital, Lagos, retired secretary Muyiwa gestured at scuffles between motorists who paid bribes to jump the queue and black marketeers filling plastic bottles to resell the fuel. —Dawn/Guardian News Service