Wednesday 15 April, 2026

The peak price Dangote's petrol reached this month. A ceasefire announcement about Iran brought it back down by ₦75. That swing is what deregulation actually means.

For a few days this month, Dangote Petroleum Refinery's ex-gantry petrol price sat at ₦1,275 per litre. Then the United States announced a conditional two-week pause on military action against Iran. Geopolitical tension dropped. Brent crude fell by 13%. Dangote's price came back to ₦1,200.

The ₦75 difference between those two prices was not caused by anything that happened in Nigeria. Not by production changes. Not by supply chain decisions. Not by NNPC crude allocations. By a diplomatic development in the Middle East that took less than a day to transmit into what marketers pay at the gantry and what you pay at the pump.

Nigeria has Africa's largest single-train refinery. It was supposed to insulate the country from exactly this kind of volatility. The refinery is operating. It's supplying over 90% of Nigeria's petrol after import licences were suspended earlier this year. And it's pricing with Brent crude because that's what a market-reflective model does.

The protection from global shocks that local refining was meant to provide has not arrived. Your transport costs are indexed to Tehran. That's what deregulation looks like when the infrastructure exists but the pricing model doesn't change.