Oil is above $100. Nigeria is pumping 500,000 barrels fewer per day than it planned.

This is the oil paradox nobody is talking about clearly.

OPEC's reference basket averaged $102.58 per barrel this month. Nigeria's 2026 budget was built on $64.85. That gap — more than $37 per barrel — should be flowing into federation accounts as windfall revenue. The Fiscal Responsibility Act and the Constitution both require the government to adjust its Medium Term Expenditure Framework when macroeconomic assumptions change materially. A windfall of this size qualifies. The government hasn't presented a supplementary budget.

But here's the production side of the equation, which is getting less attention.

Nigeria's crude output in February was 1.31 million barrels per day, according to OPEC data. The 2026 budget assumes 1.84 million barrels per day. That's a gap of 530,000 barrels every single day — barrels that exist on paper in the revenue projections but don't exist in the real world because of pipeline theft, infrastructure decay, and chronic underinvestment in upstream operations.

So the math looks like this. Oil is $37 above budget assumptions. But Nigeria is selling 530,000 fewer barrels per day than it planned to sell. At current prices, that missing production represents roughly $20 billion in annual export value that Nigeria theoretically has but can't access. The windfall and the shortfall are happening simultaneously.

And while the revenue picture is complicated, the cost picture is simple. The same oil price that should ease the deficit is pushing petrol past N1,300 per litre because Nigeria still imports most of its refined fuel. The state captures part of the crude upside. Households absorb the entire refined product downside.

An oil boom that enriches the government while punishing its citizens isn't an anomaly in Nigeria. It's the pattern. The only question is whether this government will present a supplementary budget that formally accounts for the windfall, or whether the money will circulate and disappear the way it has before.

The Excess Crude Account was supposed to catch windfalls. It's been raided so consistently that it barely functions as a concept anymore. The current oil price is above $100. The government's response, so far, is silence.