THE WORLD IS NOT WATCHING. IT IS BEING SHAPED.

Editorial Team
Apr 23
8 min read

Feature Essay: Conflict, Global Markets and What It All Means for You By the Eagle Badger Data Analytics Editorial Team, West Africa and Global Desk

The Discipline Nobody Taught You: Why Geopolitics Is the Most Important Lens You Are Not Using

In the last months of 2025, a Lagos-based importer of refined petroleum products was sitting in a comfortable position. Crude prices were moderate. The naira had stabilised. The newly operational Dangote Refinery offered a sliver of local supply. Life, by recent Nigerian standards, was manageable. By March 2026, that same importer was staring at landing costs nearly 45% higher, a shipping lane effectively closed by a war neither he nor most of his competitors saw coming, and a government too distracted to offer a coherent response.

This is Geopolitics, the study of how geography, power, resources, and ideology combine to shape the behaviour of states and, through states, the behaviour of everything else: markets, supply chains, currencies, food prices, and elections. This isn't just for diplomats and scholars. It’s actually what drives every business deal, investment, and development plan out there.

For too long, the conventional wisdom in business has been that geopolitics is background noise, something to track in newspaper headlines but not something to factor into a quarterly strategy. The Iran-US war of 2026 has definitively ended that era of comfortable ignorance. What is happening in the Persian Gulf today is reshaping economies from Singapore to Senegal. It is proof, if proof were still needed, that the forces of global power politics do not acknowledge the boundaries of your sector, your company, or your continent.

Geopolitics is not a column in the newspaper. It is the architecture beneath every market, every supply chain, and every election on earth. Ignoring it is not neutrality. It is a choice to be surprised.

The War That Was Years in the Making: Iran, the United States, and the Long Road to Conflict

To understand the war, you must resist the temptation to begin your analysis on February 28, 2026, when the first US and Israeli strikes hit Iranian soil. The conflict did not begin that morning. It was the culmination of a decades-long confrontation over nuclear capability, regional hegemony, and the future shape of the Middle Eastern order.

From the moment Donald Trump returned to the White House in early 2025, his administration reinstated a maximum pressure campaign against Tehran, explicitly refusing to tolerate Iranian nuclear capability and threatening serious military consequences if a new deal was not reached. Negotiations opened in Oman in April 2025, moved through Rome and Muscat, and were described by both sides as constructive until they were not. In June 2025, Israel struck Iran's nuclear facilities directly, killing key military commanders in what became known as the Twelve-Day War. Iran's nuclear programme was declared neutralised. By February 2026, Trump was telling the US Congress it had restarted.

Simultaneously, Iran was imploding from within. Protests that began as economic grievances, driven by inflation, unemployment, and sanctions, became the largest anti-government uprising since the 1979 revolution, with about one million Iranians on the streets across different provinces and districts, with the government responding with mass killings and incarcerations. The regime, weakened, cornered, and defiant, was a dangerous actor.

On February 28, 2026, the strike came. Supreme Leader Khamenei was assassinated. Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile infrastructure was targeted. Iran responded with missiles and drones against Israel, US bases across the region, and energy infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE. The war that analysts had predicted for two decades had arrived. Preliminary casualty estimates stand at approximately 1,500 dead in Iran, at least 18 in Israel, 13 US soldiers killed, and more than 80,000 civilian structures damaged or destroyed across Iranian territory.

The Strait That Moved the World: When a Chokepoint Closes, Everyone Pays

The single most consequential development of the war, beyond the geopolitical realignment it has triggered, is the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Through this narrow neck of water, roughly 20 percent of global oil supply transits daily, alongside critical volumes of LNG, jet fuel, and LPG serving Asia and Europe. When insurance markets withdrew cover for vessels transiting the strait in early March 2026, the effect was equivalent to a physical blockade. Over 3,000 vessels are currently stranded in the Middle East, waiting for a resolution.

Oil prices have risen approximately 45% since hostilities began, with Brent crude crossing $110 per barrel and touching $112 at its peak. The International Energy Agency has characterised the situation as the greatest global energy and food security challenge in living memory. Iraq and Kuwait, whose export infrastructure runs through the Gulf, began curtailing production as local storage filled with no viable export route.

The Strait of Hormuz has been on risk maps for decades. Every serious scenario planning exercise at an energy company, sovereign wealth fund, or government treasury included a Hormuz closure scenario. The question was never if. It was when, and whether you had prepared for it.

What This War Means for West Africa, and for Nigeria in Particular

Distant wars have local consequences. This is mostly applicable in our current reality and it is operating right now across West African markets with specificity and force. The region sits at the intersection of multiple shockwaves simultaneously. A war fought thousands of kilometres away is right now recalibrating the cost of fuel in Lagos, the price of rice in Dakar, the trade deficit of Accra, and the political stability calculus of every government in the Sahel.

Nigeria stands in a particularly sharp position because it is both an oil producer and a fuel importer. It earns from crude at international prices while its citizens pay the consequence of imported inflation on refined products. The numbers that have come out of Nigeria's downstream petroleum market since the war began are extraordinary, and they deserve to be read carefully.

Nigeria: The Real-Time Fuel Story

When the war broke out on February 28, 2026, Dangote Refinery, Nigeria's dominant domestic supplier, was selling petrol at its gantry at N774 per litre. Within days, as Brent crude surged past $80, then $100, and eventually $112 per barrel, the refinery was forced into a rapid sequence of price revisions that had no precedent in the history of Nigeria's downstream sector.

On March 2, the refinery suspended petrol loading operations at midnight after international crude surged past $80 per barrel overnight, then raised its ex-depot gantry price from N774 to N875 per litre. That was only the beginning. By the third week of March, the refinery had adjusted its gantry price five times in a single month, moving from N774 per litre at the start of the month through N874, then N1,050, N1,175, N1,245, and finally N1,275 per litre, while its coastal price rose from N1,512,648 to N1,646,748 per metric tonne.

As petrol prices jumped to around N1,300 per litre in various parts of Nigeria, the Dangote Refinery attributed the developments to the prolonged instability in global oil markets caused directly by the Iran-US war, with Brent reaching its highest level since mid-2022.

The effect at the pump was immediate and severe. Nigeria recorded a 39.5 percent increase in pump prices between February 23 and March 16, making it the country with the sharpest petrol price increase in the world over that period, outpacing Laos at 32.9 percent, Australia and Vietnam at 31.8 percent each, and the United States at 23.6 percent.

By March 23, NNPCL filling stations in Abuja had raised their petrol price to N1,367 per litre, up from N1,261, pushing domestic pump prices above one dollar per litre for the first time, with the naira trading at N1,353.90 to the dollar at the official market.

By March 25, MRS Oil Nigeria stations in Lagos were selling at around N1,332 per litre, TotalEnergies outlets were in the same range, and petrol in Abuja had climbed to between N1,361 and N1,370 per litre in some locations. Cities like Akure and Kaduna were seeing prices hovering around N1,340 to N1,370 per litre, while parts of Ogun State were recording prices above N1,350.

The most recent development, as of March 27, 2026, offers a tentative moment of relief. Dangote Refinery has reduced its gantry price for petrol to N1,200 per litre and its coastal price to N1,153 per litre, a cut of N75 to N85 from the recent peak of N1,275 to N1,285 per litre. Analysts expect this to translate into a retail pump price reduction of between N50 and N70 per litre at major filling stations, potentially settling prices around N1,291 to N1,311 per litre, as crude oil briefly dipped below $100 per barrel before stabilising at around $107 for Brent.

Nigeria's exchange rate is being pulled in two directions simultaneously. The oil windfall at $110 per barrel is flooding government coffers well beyond the $64.85 budget benchmark, which should theoretically support the naira. But the same war generating those revenues is also inflating Nigeria's import bill, particularly for refined fuel, draining foreign exchange through the back door just as fast as crude earnings bring it in. On top of that, global investors fleeing to safe-haven assets during the conflict are pulling capital out of emerging markets broadly, and Nigeria is among the first stops on that exit route. The naira has already crossed N1,353 to the dollar at the official window, the parallel market premium is quietly widening again, and the CBN faces the familiar impossible choice of burning reserves to defend the currency or letting it slide and deepening the inflation that N1,300 per litre petrol has already started. Nigeria is earning more petrodollars than it has in years and its currency is still weakening.

It does not mean the crisis is over. Pump prices remain more than 50 percent above where they stood before the war.

The structural picture is equally important to understand. Nigeria's 2026 budget was based on a crude oil price benchmark of $64.85 per barrel, 1.84 million barrels per day of daily output, and an exchange rate of N1,400 to the dollar. With crude at $110 per barrel, the government has overshot its revenue target by approximately 70 percent. And yet its citizens are languishing in hardship, a direct consequence of the subsidy removal that means windfall oil revenues no longer cushion domestic fuel prices.

The refinery is also operating below capacity. It requires around 12 crude cargoes to operate at full throughput but is receiving closer to five from Nigerian government-linked oil companies, forcing it to source the remainder at international benchmark prices. This is the structural vulnerability at the heart of Nigeria's energy paradox: a country sitting atop enormous crude reserves, running the largest refinery on the continent, yet still exposed to the full force of global price volatility because domestic crude supply to that refinery is inadequate.

Why Geopolitics Must Become a Core Competency The Iran-U.S. war isn't just a one-off event. It’s the tipping point of a deep change in world politics that’s been building up for a while now. The consensus that shaped the post-Cold War era, defined by the aggressive expansion of global supply chains and the uninhibited movement of capital is evolving. We are moving away from a period where geopolitical risk was treated as a secondary variable in economic modeling. We have entered an era of great-power competition, supply chain weaponisation, sanctions as standard instruments of statecraft, and resource nationalism. In this era, geopolitical literacy is not a luxury but a necessity.

Consider what the organisations that got this right were able to do. The ones who had scenario-planned the Hormuz closure, who tracked the nuclear negotiation timetables, who understood the domestic dynamics inside Iran, were able to hedge their energy exposure in advance, adjust their supply chains before the disruption hit, advise their boards from a position of understanding rather than reaction, and identify the opportunities that crises invariably create alongside their risks.

Consider the alternative. The reactive scramble. The emergency board meetings. The rushed decisions made with incomplete information in the middle of a moving crisis. That is what unprepared organisations are doing right now.

The discipline of geopolitics asks foundational questions that every organisation operating in the world today must be able to answer. Where does my supply chain run, and through which geopolitical chokepoints? Which governments' decisions most affect my revenues? What does a disruption in any given region mean for my cost base? Which risks am I treating as background noise that are actually systemic? Where are the opportunities hidden inside the next crisis?

They are operational questions. And the gap between organisations that answer them well and those that do not is growing wider with every passing crisis.

You Should Not Navigate Geopolitical Alone.

At Eagle Badger Data Analytics, we provide bespoke geopolitical intelligence for governments, corporations, investors, and institutions operating across West Africa and beyond. We do not offer news. We offer analysis, foresight, and strategic clarity. Our work spans strategic risk assessment, supply chain geopolitics, scenario planning, investor intelligence, government advisory, and executive education.