Monday April 20, 2026

We saw it. Did you?

On Friday afternoon, Nigerian fuel marketers were already calculating how fast the price would fall.

Iran and the United States had agreed a ceasefire. The Strait of Hormuz was reopening. Brent crude dropped around 9 per cent in a single day. The Petroleum Products Retail Outlet Owners Association of Nigeria projected petrol would fall from N1,261 to below N1,000 per litre. One spokesperson said the product was at N800 before the crisis. He expected a return to that range.

Twenty-four hours later, Iran reclosed the strait.

Iranian gunboats fired at a merchant vessel attempting to cross. Trump posted on Truth Social that Iran had violated the ceasefire agreement. By Sunday morning, petrol in Nigeria was between N1,290 and N1,350 per litre and talks had returned to Islamabad.

The signal that was visible on Friday, before Saturday's reversal, was this. Nigeria was celebrating the opening of a waterway it doesn't control, in a war it isn't part of, over a commodity it produces but cannot price for itself.

Twenty per cent of globally traded oil transits the Strait of Hormuz. Nigeria produces crude oil. Nigeria also imports refined petrol, because its own refineries don't run at full capacity. So when the Hormuz situation shifts, Nigeria feels it in two directions at once. As a producer watching crude prices move. As a consumer watching pump prices respond upward fast and downward slowly.

The Friday optimism wasn't wrong exactly. If the strait had stayed open, prices would have fallen. But the assumption underneath the optimism was that Iran and the United States had reached a durable peace. In a conflict that has surprised the world three times in six weeks, that assumption deserved more scrutiny before the close of business on a Friday afternoon.

What a careful reader could have caught on Friday was this. Every analyst projecting a return to N900 per litre was assuming a geopolitical outcome that was not yet settled. That optimism sat on top of a structural truth that doesn't change regardless of what happens in Islamabad. Nigeria's fuel price is connected to a market it doesn't control, priced by a chain it doesn't regulate, and exposed to a conflict it has no part in.

The crisis made that visible. The lesson isn't pessimism. It's precision. Nigeria's fuel market moves on events no one in Abuja can predict or control. That was true before the Strait of Hormuz closed. It will be true after it reopens. The country that produces oil still cannot decide what its citizens pay for it.