ABUJA – Shehu Aminu gave up his taxi in April. He had no choice: the fuel that once cost him 800 naira per liter had climbed past 1,400 naira, driven by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and the math of running a vehicle no longer worked. Without income, his family’s food supply thinned. By the time his 18-month-old daughter Farisa was taken back to a hospital in Kware Sokoto, in northwestern Nigeria, she was being treated for malnutrition for the second time in less than a year.
“Times are tough, and the food is not consistent,” his wife, Maryam, told Arab News.
Their story is one of tens of thousands unfolding thousands of kilometers from the waters where Iran’s conflict has redrawn the economics of global oil supply. The Hormuz closure, in force since February, has sent fuel prices cascading through import-dependent economies across Africa and Asia, economies that had no role in the conflict and no mechanism to cushion the shock.
In Nigeria, the effects have compounded an already fragile situation. The World Bank estimates that 139 million Nigerians are now living in poverty or in conditions of vulnerability, a figure that represents the compounding of pre-existing economic fragility with the sudden surge in energy costs. The fuel price increase, from 800 naira to 1,400 naira per liter between February and April, was the single largest driver of that deterioration in recent months.
The hospital in Sokoto that treated Farisa kept records of what followed. Since February, roughly 40 children who had previously been treated for malnutrition and sent home recovered had been readmitted. Sokoto is a predominantly agricultural city in Nigeria’s northwest, and the hospital had not seen re-treatment numbers like that in recent years. Malnutrition is not reversing here; it is cycling back.
The United Nations children’s agency estimated that up to 23.4 million additional children globally could fall into poverty as a result of the conflict’s economic shock waves, with 80 percent of that toll concentrated in Africa and Asia. “Children are paying the price for escalating conflict in the Middle East, including children far beyond the region,” said Catherine Russell, UNICEF’s executive director.
The paradox is acute for Nigeria, which is itself an oil-producing country. Nigeria’s offshore fields continue to pump crude, but the country imports refined fuel because its domestic refinery capacity has long been inadequate to meet internal demand. When global refined fuel prices spike, Nigerian consumers absorb the increase even as the Nigerian state theoretically benefits from higher export revenues. The Hormuz closure broke that circuit in ways that benefited no one: crude prices rose, but refined fuel import costs rose faster, and the relief that higher crude revenues might have provided was slow to translate into consumer-facing subsidies.
SBM Intelligence, a Lagos-based geopolitical risk advisory firm, described Nigeria’s position as one of structural vulnerability, an economy exposed to global energy price shocks on the consumption side regardless of what happens on the production side.
The Aminu family’s situation illustrates a dynamic that economists have described in aggregate but that hospitals record in individual cases. A fuel price increase is not, by itself, a food crisis. It becomes one when it eliminates the income of families at the margin, reduces the affordability of food transported over long distances, raises the cost of cooking fuel for households using kerosene or liquefied petroleum gas, and exhausts the informal safety nets that typically absorb shocks in low-income environments. All of those channels are operating simultaneously in Sokoto.
The Eastern Herald has reported on the broader economic cascade from the Hormuz closure, including how the Gulf states and Iran’s blockade strategy have reshaped global oil supply chains. What is less visible in commodity market data is the secondary effect in low-income countries: not higher prices for investors, but empty plates for children whose families can no longer absorb a transportation cost increase.
UNICEF’s 23.4 million figure represents a projection under a scenario in which the conflict continues at its current level. The actual number of children newly impoverished since February is likely already in the millions. What the agency has not been able to project is when or whether the situation reverses. The Hormuz closure has shown no sign of resolution, and Nigeria’s government has not announced a specific intervention targeting the malnutrition surge in the northwest.
Earlier in the conflict, the Eastern Herald noted that the World Bank cut its global growth forecast to 2.5 percent as the Iran war dragged commodity and trade projections downward. The June forecast already incorporated the energy price increase; what it did not fully capture was the second-order effect of that increase on household food security in import-dependent economies.
What makes the Nigeria situation particularly difficult to reverse quickly is that malnutrition in early childhood has physiological consequences that outlast its immediate causes. Children who experience protein deficiency during the window between ages one and two can sustain developmental setbacks that persist even after food access is restored. Farisa’s age places her squarely in that window. Whether the treatments she is receiving now will be enough depends partly on factors her family cannot control: whether the Hormuz standoff ends, whether Nigeria’s government intervenes with subsidies, whether the informal networks that once supplemented family income remain intact.
Maryam said she no longer knew when the next meal would come with certainty. Farisa was being treated. The underlying conditions that had twice placed her in malnutrition, a household stripped of income and a food supply interrupted by energy costs, remained unchanged.
