By Africa.com
There is something almost cinematic about Nigeria’s current energy moment. The country that once queued for imported petrol — a humiliation that played out at filling stations for decades — is now the refinery that keeps European planes in the air. The irony is as rich as the crude oil beneath the Niger Delta. And it is costing ordinary Nigerians dearly.
The Dangote Petroleum Refinery, Africa’s largest, has quietly become one of the most consequential pieces of industrial infrastructure on the planet right now. Since the ongoing US-Iran war effectively shut off tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — a waterway that historically funnelled close to 40% of Europe’s aviation fuel imports — buyers across Europe have turned to Nigeria at a pace that is breaking records. April shipments of jet fuel from Nigeria to Europe have reached approximately 66,000 barrels per day, the highest level ever recorded.
The numbers are staggering. The refinery’s jet fuel exports reached a record 158,000 barrels per day in April 2026 — a 770% increase from initial export volumes of roughly 18,000 barrels per day in April 2024. In just two years, Dangote has gone from a regional startup to a dominant global supplier. The facility is currently producing an estimated 20 million litres of Jet A-1 fuel daily and has already delivered cargoes to the UK’s Milford Haven port — its first confirmed aviation fuel shipment to Britain.
Europe, meanwhile, is in genuine distress. The International Energy Agency estimates the continent has roughly six weeks of jet fuel supply remaining, with prices in northwest Europe surging to about $1,744 per tonne — nearly double pre-war levels. KLM has already started cutting flights. Air France-KLM made the painful decision despite having hedged most of its fuel exposure. Aliko Dangote’s refinery is, for now, one of the few things standing between European aviation and mass cancellations.
But here is where the story turns bitter.
Back in Lagos, in Abuja, in Kano — Nigerian airlines are on the verge of grounding their fleets. The Airlines Operators of Nigeria (AON) has revealed that fuel prices have surged by up to 300% since the Middle East crisis began, even as the Dangote refinery — which now supplies over 95% of Nigeria’s Jet A1 fuel — continues to offer products at comparatively lower rates.
The question this raises should make every Nigerian furious: how does a country sitting atop the continent’s most powerful refinery end up paying three times more for the very product it produces?
AON spokesperson Obiora Okonkwo has been direct about what is happening, alleging that fuel marketers are creating artificial scarcity despite available supply from the refinery, and that what airlines pay bears no resemblance to actual depot prices.
Allen Onyema, the chief executive of Air Peace and president of the AON, called on marketers to explain how prices could rise by as much as 300% when Dangote’s supply remains the cheapest available and some of them source directly from the refinery. His question — “So, why the astronomical rise?” — has yet to receive a satisfactory answer.
The word being used in aviation circles is racketeering. That is not a small allegation. It points to a distribution chain that has learned to profit from the gap between what a refinery charges and what an airline eventually pays — a gap widened, deliberately or not, by layers of middlemen who have no incentive to compress margins.
The persistence of intermediary bottlenecks even after domestic refining capacity has improved is the deeper structural issue. While Dangote has reduced Nigeria’s dependence on imports — a historic vulnerability — it has not fully insulated end-users from pricing opacity.
There is a global dimension to this, too. China and South Korea have tightened export restrictions to protect their own domestic markets as the Hormuz crisis deepens. Nigeria, by contrast, appears to have no equivalent protective mechanism for its own aviation sector. The refinery, operating as a private commercial entity, is doing precisely what any rational business would do: selling to the highest bidder. Europe, facing a supply emergency, is that bidder.
The result is a country exporting a lifeline while struggling to keep its own planes in the sky.
This is not an argument against Dangote exporting. A private refinery has every right to seek global markets, and Nigeria’s re-emergence as a major player in the global downstream oil market is genuinely good news for the continent’s economic standing. But the government’s failure to build a regulatory framework that protects domestic consumers — even as the refinery scales to global significance — is a policy gap that demands urgent attention.
For policymakers, the implications are clear. The federal government faces mounting pressure to enhance transparency in fuel pricing, enforce competition, and ensure that the benefits of local refining translate into lower costs for critical industries. Failure to address these distortions risks undermining one of the key economic advantages the refinery was expected to deliver: cost stability.
Nigeria has built something remarkable. A refinery that can shift the calculus of global aviation fuel markets in a crisis. A facility that has made the country indispensable to Europe. That is an extraordinary achievement — one that Aliko Dangote and the thousands who built that plant in Lekki deserve credit for.
But a country whose airlines cannot afford the fuel produced within its own borders has not yet solved its energy problem. It has merely changed who profits from it.
That, ultimately, is the story of Nigeria in 2026: still waiting for the windfall to land at home