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The chest freezer in a frozen foods shop at Sabon Gari market in Kano stopped running at night in March. Alima, its owner, did not experience this as an economic event.
She experienced it as a decision taken at seven in the evening, beside a generator, doing the arithmetic every Nigerian trader now does in her head: diesel at a price she had never paid before, against fish that might or might not sell tomorrow.
She switched the generator off, the ice went soft by morning, and her stock today is roughly half February’s. Hold on to the part that matters, because the whole argument turns on it.
Her diesel bill did not rise. It fell, because she bought less diesel. In any accounting that measures the cost of a war by what people spent, she appears as a saving.
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Americans have been handed a number for this war: roughly $131.4 billion in extra spending on petrol and diesel, with latest figures of petrol prices up 46.2% and diesel prices 71%, according to the Brown University’s Iran War Energy Cost Tracker.
This article assembles the Nigerian equivalent, and then the other side of it, which matters more. Over the 226 days from 1 March to 12 October, Nigerians paid an estimated ₦6.69 trillion extra at the pump, roughly $5.03 billion at the Central Bank’s rate of ₦1,331.19. Over the same days the war paid Nigeria and its oil partners about ₦13.67 trillion more for its crude, roughly twice what its citizens were charged.
The war began on 28 February 2026. Brent traded at $72.48 a barrel before it, reached almost $120 on March 9, and stood at about $104.72 on October 9. Nigeria’s position in that shock is peculiar. It sells crude, which became more expensive, and its citizens buy refined products, which became more expensive for the same reason.
Dangote’s refinery changes almost nothing here aside from the associated importing costs such as freight and insurance, because a domestic refinery buys crude at the world price and sells product at import parity. The same event raised the country’s export earnings and its households’ cost of living.
Petrol is the largest line. It sold for about ₦830 a litre before the war and now averages about ₦1,405. At a conservative ₦450 average increment and consumption averaging 42.4 million litres a day, petrol accounts for some ₦4.31 trillion over the 226 days.
Diesel is the crueller line, because almost nobody buys diesel for pleasure: it moves food to market, runs boreholes and keeps the freezer in Kano cold. Prices rose 91.8% to ₦1,899 a litre by 22 September, back-calculating to a pre-war ₦990, and have since eased to about ₦1,730. At roughly 15 million litres a day, and average increase of ₦600, diesel adds ₦2.03 trillion.
Cooking gas supplies the cleanest evidence of timing, because it is measured monthly. A 12.5 kilogramme refill cost ₦16,997.94 in February 2026, the last full month before the war, and ₦22,382.20 by April, a rise of 31.7% on a product bought almost entirely by households, adding ₦346 billion.
There should be a fourth line. Household kerosene is the fuel of the poorest Nigerians and reached nearly ₦4,000 a litre in Sokoto in April, but the only consumption volume available anywhere dates from a historical 2017 parliamentary hearing, so it is left out. The fuel of the poorest is missing because the state does not publish how much they use.
Two things about that ₦6.69 trillion. It is the national fuel bill, not a household one: much of the diesel line is bought by hauliers, factories and hospitals, and those costs reach families as the price of a bag of rice rather than as money at a pump. It is the right comparator for what Nigeria earns from the wellhead, not for a family budget.
The method is an average price increment multiplied by an average daily volume by the 226 days to 12 October, days that happened rather than days forecast, with increments below the gaps now observed and volumes from the regulator’s war-period averages.
Those increments are deliberately low: the author’s own fit of each pump price to the Brent path gives ₦514 and ₦628, the day-weighted average petrol and diesel price increment respectively per litre and a bill of ₦7.40 trillion. The conservative figure is kept because a conclusion that survives it needs no help from the generous version.
The windfall ledger is built the same way, on the observed monthly Brent Energy Information Administration (EIA). The period average is $100.39 against a pre-war $72, an uplift of $28.39, which at 1.6 million barrels a day produces gross additional oil value of $10.27 billion, about ₦13.67 trillion, or roughly twice the pump bill.
One problem must be declared: those monthlies cannot be reconciled with the $89.71 year-to-date average the same providers report, which would require January and February to have averaged $48.80 when the year’s lowest close was $59.96.
A Nigerian figure settles it. Government and operators reportedly collected ₦5.13 trillion above projection in March and April. One cited number deserves retiring: the Business Monitor International (BMI) forecast of ₦6.8 trillion for 2026 on a Brent assumption of $78.
The pump bill is also a floor, for a reason the American calculation never has to confront. Nigerians did not mostly pay these prices. They mostly stopped buying. Petrol consumption ran at 60.2 million litres a day in January and 41.5 million in August. Diesel is starker: 24.4 million litres’ supply a day in February collapsed to 10.3 million in March, a 58% fall in the war’s first month.
Nothing became 58% more efficient in four weeks. The generators simply went off. A cash total captures what buyers actually paid, which in a rich country is most of the loss. In a poor one, much of the cost appears as consumption abandoned: the journey not made, the night shift cancelled, the borehole left unpumped.
The same logic governs food, where the transmission runs through fertilizer. Urea jumped 59% cent to $780 a tonne inside a month, because roughly 40% of global urea exports originate in the Persian Gulf, and 53% of Nigeria’s fertilizer imports arrive at planting season.
The International Food Policy Research Institute has modelled the result: food poverty up 3.4 percentage points, meaning over 7.5 million additional Nigerians in food poverty, with food expenditure down 3.9% and calorie intake down 3.1%. There is no Naira figure to add here, because the adjustment was not made in Naira. It was made in meals.
This is not a story about a poor country impoverished by a distant war. Nigeria won this war financially, and comfortably.
The ₦13.67 trillion is gross value accruing to the federation and the oil operators together, not the government’s take alone, which is plausibly around half.
Nobody has published what that share came to, which is the point: a country earning most of its foreign exchange from crude has passed through the largest price shock in a decade without any institution stating what it received and what its citizens paid.
Nigeria did not even collect all of it. Nigeria’s output averaged 1.56 million barrels a day in March, 280,000 below the 1.84 million benchmark, as a leak shut the Trans Forcados Pipeline for several weeks. A separate discrepancy emerged in September: NNPC reported output of 1.821 million barrels a day, while OPEC’s secondary sources put crude production at 1.573 million.
Because the figures may differ in month and in whether condensates are included, they cannot establish a reliable daily revenue gap without further reconciliation. A country that cannot state how much oil it produces cannot audit the windfall it claims.
Nigeria also exports urea, so the shock possibly raised its exporters’ earnings and its farmers’ costs alike. The Institute puts the conclusion bluntly: Nigeria could experience net welfare gains from this shock while food poverty rises 3.4 points. The country can gain while the citizens lose, because the two have separate accounts and nothing in the present arrangement connects them.
What did connect them was a discount of ₦66 a litre for thirty days at the national oil company’s stations, available only through its mobile application, costing around ₦4.62 billion if 70 million litres, an ambitious assumption based on recent depressed level of consumption, were discounted daily using the app.
Against ₦13.67 trillion that is 0.034%, three hundredths of 1%. The person who takes a little water from the ocean has not made the ocean smaller. The woman in Kano buys diesel in cash and is not eligible. As a petro-state’s response to the largest energy shock of the decade, it is a gesture with a press release attached.
Four things follow. Publish the two ledgers together, quarterly, since a state that reports only the revenue side of a shock will always conclude, truthfully, that the shock was good for the country. Build the buffer before the next shock, because a buffer operating by discretion is a hope. Fix the volume constraint, since the lost 280,000 barrels a day went to a pipeline leak. Then target relief at the poorest households rather than at litres and accelerate gas conversion.
None of this argues that Nigeria should have been insulated from a global war. No country was. The argument is narrower: that Nigeria was handed a windfall roughly twice what the same event cost its citizens at the pump, that no institution has set the two ledgers side by side, and that what reached the household was ₦66 a litre for thirty days through an app. Every one of those is a domestic decision or a domestic failure. None was made in Tehran.
The freezer at Sabon Gari runs for part of the night now. Alima has not restored her order and will not until she believes the price will hold, which she does not. That hesitation is the real cost of this war, and it appears in no statistic the country publishes.
Akinola Morakinyo (Ph. D) writes on MINT economies from the Department of Economics, Finance & Quantitative Analysis, Kennesaw State University, GA, USA.
