When the pump price goes up in Tehran, we bleed in Lagos, By Bámidélé Adémólá-Olátéjú

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Now, we have a war conceived in Washington and executed over the Persian Gulf, whose costs will be paid in naira and in the daily suffering of ordinary Nigerians who are already at the absolute limit of what they can absorb. I do not say this to generate despair. I say it because understanding the pattern is the first step to breaking it. Nigeria’s structural vulnerability to external shocks is not an act of God. It is the accumulated consequence of decades of decisions…

The US-Israel war on Iran is being decided in boardrooms and bunkers in Washington and Tel Aviv. But the bill will be paid at filling stations in Abuja, market stalls in Onitsha, and bread queues in Kano. I am Nigerian. I know exactly what this war is about to do to us.

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Let me begin where most Nigerian mornings begin; at a filling station. You arrive early, before the queue snakes out into the road. The attendant tells you the price per litre has gone up again. You ask why. He shrugs. Somewhere, he says, there is a war. There is always a war. And somehow, mysteriously, devastatingly, that war always finds its way to your fuel tank, your food market, your electricity bill, and the roof over your head.

That is the lived texture of what it means to be Nigerian in a globalised world that has never once asked for our consent. On 28 February, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran, killing Supreme Leader Khamenei and decapitating the Islamic Republic’s top military and political leadership. We are now six days in. The Strait of Hormuz is choking. Brent crude has surged nearly 10 per cent. Tanker routes are in chaos. And here in Nigeria, the consequences are not abstract. They are already queuing up alongside us.

We Are an Oil Nation that Cannot Afford Oil

The first thing any international analyst will tell you about Nigeria and this war is that rising oil prices should benefit us. Nigeria is Africa’s largest producer of crude oil. Higher prices mean more revenues for the federation. On paper, this is correct. In reality, it is a cruel joke that we have been living for decades. We produce the crude. We export it, almost entirely unrefined. Then we turn around and import the same crude back as petrol, diesel, and kerosene, because our refineries have been run to the ground by decades of mismanagement. The Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna refineries are monuments to what Nigeria could have been. The Dangote Refinery in Lekki is our last great hope for breaking this cycle, and it is still ramping up, still far from the capacity we need.

So, when Brent crude climbs toward $100 a barrel because of a war in the Persian Gulf, Nigeria does not pump more oil fast enough to capture the windfall. Our production has been hobbled at around 1.3 million to 1.5 million barrels per day, well short of our licensed capacity, because of pipeline vandalism in the Niger Delta, underinvestment by the oil majors, and a regulatory environment that drives capital away faster than conflict does. Meanwhile, the import bill for refined petroleum products is ballooning. The naira, already a patient being nurtured to health by President Tinubu’s economic reforms, would take another hit. And ordinary Nigerians, who have already survived the removal of fuel subsidy, the unification of the exchange rate, and an inflation rate that has been savaging their purchasing power for two years, will have to absorb yet another shock that originated in a conflict they had no vote in and no voice over.

The Naira Cannot Take Much More of This

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There is a direct line between what is happening in the Strait of Hormuz and what happens to the naira at Bureau de Change in Wuse Market or on any street corner in Lagos Island. It works like this. The Iran war triggers a global flight to safety. International investors pull money out of risk assets. In the taxonomy of global finance, Nigeria is permanently classified as a risk asset. Foreign portfolio investors who hold positions in Nigerian treasury bills and bonds begin to exit. Dollars flow out, the naira weakens, and import costs and inflation rises.

There are analyses of this war that will be written in economics journals and foreign policy quarterlies, full of elegant models and carefully hedged projections. I respect analyses. But I trust the women in Balogun Market in Lagos. I trust the grain traders in Sabon Gari Market in Kano. I trust the tomato sellers in Mile 12. They do not need PhD degrees to understand supply chains. They understand them in their bones, in their daily calculations of what to buy, what to price, and what to leave on the shelf…

Our external reserves, which give us some capacity to defend the exchange rate and meet import obligations, are not inexhaustible. The Central Bank of Nigeria has been working hard, under genuinely difficult circumstances, to stabilise a currency that has lost an enormous fraction of its value over the past two years. A sustained war in the Middle East, with sustained capital outflows from emerging markets globally, is precisely the kind of external shock that can undo months of painstaking monetary management in a matter of weeks.

And then there is the debt. Nigeria spends a huge share of its federal revenue on debt service, with many of them denominated in dollars. When the naira falls, the naira cost of those dollar debts rises automatically, without a single additional kobo being borrowed. The fiscal space that President Tinubu’s administration has been painstakingly trying to create, through painful and politically costly reforms, gets compressed by a war in which Nigeria is not a participant and has no influence whatsoever.

The Market Women Will Tell You Before the Economists Do

There are analyses of this war that will be written in economics journals and foreign policy quarterlies, full of elegant models and carefully hedged projections. I respect analyses. But I trust the women in Balogun Market in Lagos. I trust the grain traders in Sabon Gari Market in Kano. I trust the tomato sellers in Mile 12. They do not need PhD degrees to understand supply chains. They understand them in their bones, in their daily calculations of what to buy, what to price, and what to leave on the shelf, because their customers can no longer afford these. What those market women already know, or will know within days, is this: the Iran war is a food price crisis in disguise.

The Middle East and North Africa are the world’s largest importers of wheat. With countries in those regions now scrambling to secure food supplies, amid conflict and sanctions, global grain stocks have come under pressure and prices are rising. Nigeria imports significant volumes of wheat for its bread, pasta, and noodle industries, sectors that have grown dramatically as urbanisation has changed how Nigerians eat. When international wheat prices spike, the woman who buys a loaf of bread in Ibadan pays for a war in Tehran that she has never heard of in a place that she cannot point to on a map.

We are also a net importer of fish, a staple protein for tens of millions of Nigerians, much of which transits through shipping routes that are now being disrupted. We import machinery, chemicals, and equipment through Gulf shipping lanes that are now operating under extreme duress. The cascading effect of disruptions travels down supply chains with remarkable speed and accuracy, always arriving, in the end, at the table of the person least able to afford them.

Africa Is Not a Spectator. It Is the Bill.

Nigeria’s experience is not unique. Across the continent, finance ministries are staring at the same ugly arithmetic. Kenya, Ghana, Egypt, Ethiopia, Zambia, Angola: all of these countries carry significant dollar-denominated debt loads. All of them are net importers of fuel or food or both. All of them will face tightening global financial conditions as international capital retreats to the safety of US treasuries and European bonds. Egypt is perhaps the most immediately exposed; its Suez Canal revenues have already been disrupted. It is heavily dependent on food imports, and its IMF programme leaves almost no room for an unanticipated external shock of this magnitude.

The African Union must convene an emergency economic coordination mechanism immediately. Nigeria should lead that call. Collective action on emergency food procurement, coordinated messaging to international creditors on debt relief, and a shared early-warning infrastructure for supply chain disruptions are not aspirational ideas for a future summit communique. They are necessities for the next ninety days.

For the broader universe of African and emerging market economies, this war arrives at a moment of accumulated exhaustion: the COVID-19 fiscal shock, commodity price volatility unleashed by the Russia-Ukraine war, and the most aggressive US Federal Reserve tightening cycle in four decades, which raised borrowing costs for every emerging market government simultaneously. There is also a wave of sovereign debt restructurings from Zambia to Sri Lanka to Ghana. These countries entered 2026 with shallow reserves, stretched budgets, and populations whose patience for further economic pain has long since run out. And now this. A third major geopolitical shock in six years, with no African nation at the negotiating table, no African voice in the room where the decisions are made, and the full cost of the consequences falling disproportionately on the continent that contributed least to causing them.

What Must Be Done, Without Sentiment

I am not here to wallow. Nigerians do not have the luxury of wallowing. We have a country to run and a population of over 220 million people to feed, educate, and keep alive. So let me be direct about what must happen, starting today. The Tinubu administration must resist every political temptation to use the restoration of fuel subsidy as a safety valve for public anger. That road usually ends in fiscal ruin, and we have been down it before. Instead, the government must treat the Dangote Refinery and every other domestic refining investment as a matter of national security, not merely economic policy. Every day we remain dependent on imported refined products is another day a war we did not start can hold our economy hostage. We must also accelerate the rehabilitation of our oil production capacity. Every barrel left in the ground during a price surge is pure value destruction – value that should be building infrastructure, funding education, and servicing the debt that is strangling our fiscal headroom. The Niger Delta security situation, pipeline vandalism, and oil theft are not merely criminal problems. In the context of a global oil shock, they are economic sabotage of the entire nation.

The African Union must convene an emergency economic coordination mechanism immediately. Nigeria should lead that call. Collective action on emergency food procurement, coordinated messaging to international creditors on debt relief, and a shared early-warning infrastructure for supply chain disruptions are not aspirational ideas for a future summit communique. They are necessities for the next ninety days. Our Finance Minister and Central Bank Governor must be in direct, active dialogue with the IMF, World Bank, and African Development Bank right now – not in six months’ time when the crisis will be fully visible – while there is still room to negotiate contingency financing arrangements, before they become emergency bailouts.

We Have Always Paid for Wars We Did Not Start

There is a historical pattern here that Nigerians of my generation know in their bone marrow, even if they have never articulated it in these terms. The 1970s oil shock that briefly made Nigeria rich also made it dependent on oil revenues in ways that left the economy naked when prices fell. The 1980s structural adjustment demanded by Washington and the IMF was, in part, the consequence of global interest rate decisions made in America to fight their inflation. The 2008 financial crisis, caused by American banks, crashed Nigerian stock prices and tightened credit for Nigerian businesses. The COVID pandemic, whose origins were in China, devastated Nigerian tourism, aviation, and trade. The Russia-Ukraine war spiked food and fuel prices in Nigerian markets, where no Russian or Ukrainian has ever traded.

Now, we have a war conceived in Washington and executed over the Persian Gulf, whose costs will be paid in naira and in the daily suffering of ordinary Nigerians who are already at the absolute limit of what they can absorb. I do not say this to generate despair. I say it because understanding the pattern is the first step to breaking it. Nigeria’s structural vulnerability to external shocks is not an act of God. It is the accumulated consequence of decades of decisions; to keep our refineries broken, to keep our agriculture underfunded, to keep our dollar dependence intact, to keep our debt management undisciplined, to keep our institutions too weak to buffer us against a world that does not care about our suffering. Those are all decisions that can be reversed. Not overnight, and certainly not without pain. But they can be reversed, and the urgency of reversing them has never been more apparent than it is today, watching the Strait of Hormuz close in real time and knowing, with a certainty born of bitter experience, exactly where the consequences will land.

When the pump price goes up in Tehran, we bleed in Lagos. We always have. The question for this generation of Nigerian leadership is whether we will finally decide that enough is enough.

Bámidélé Adémólá-Olátéjú, former Commissioner for Information in Ondo State, is director of New Media and Corporate Communications of the All Progressives Congress (APC). Twitter: @BamideleUpfront; Facebook: facebook.com/Bamidele. BAO