Three Prices Moved. All of Them in Dollars.

Three prices moved this week and every one of them is set in dollars. Access to the American market got cheaper for two more years. Energy got dearer. Money itself is about to cost more. If you earn in naira or shillings and spend in naira or shillings, none of those decisions were yours and all of them reach you.

Access got cheaper, and the clock is short

Congress cleared a two-year extension of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, the Senate 90 to 6 in August and the House 370 to 48 on 1 September, carried inside the continuing resolution. Duty-free access for eligible sub-Saharan countries now runs to 31 December 2028, and the third-country fabric rule survives, so a factory in Kenya can keep importing Asian cloth and still ship duty-free. Fifteen years of lobbying bought two years of certainty. Take the access. Do not build a decade on it.

One thing worth knowing if you shipped during the gap. The retroactive duty refunds run back to the lapse that began on 30 September 2025, and they arrived with the February reauthorisation earlier this year. If you paid duties in that window and have not claimed, the money is still sitting there. This week's extension is a separate thing. It buys 2027 and 2028.

Energy got dearer, and the strait is still open

Renewed US-Iran strikes pushed Brent to about $96, roughly 8 percent up on the week, after Iran fired missiles at Kuwait and traffic through the Strait of Hormuz became a weekly question. The strait is still open, and busier than usual. The US Energy Secretary put 17 million barrels through it on Monday under military protection, a wartime record. What has moved is not supply. It is the risk premium sitting on top of every barrel, and it can unwind as fast as it arrived.

Nigeria sits on both sides of that. Brent near $96 is roughly $31 above the $64.85 benchmark in the 2026 budget, which fills the treasury. But the country imports its refined fuel, so the same barrel empties household wallets. Headline inflation eased to 15.43 percent in July while food inflation rose to 20.31 percent, its highest in ten months. A household does not buy the headline. It buys food. We track what each government decision does to that gap in the Policy Tracker.

Money is about to cost more, probably

The FOMC meets on 15 and 16 September. Fed funds futures put a 25 basis point hike near 56 to 58 percent, prediction markets somewhat lower, and the August jobs report on 4 September came in soft enough to argue the other way. Treat it as a coin weighted towards a hike, not a settled fact. The direction is what matters. A Fed that is hiking rather than cutting means a stronger dollar and costlier dollar debt for everyone outside America, and that is the third dollar-denominated price in a week of three.

What this actually means for your money

Your costs are in naira. If your income is too, you carry the full weight of every currency move. Getting even a third of your earnings in dollars, through a remote contract or a retainer, means part of your life is insulated. Start with one client, not a career change.

The mechanic is worth stating plainly, because this is a hedge and not a pay rise. Rent, food and transport are priced locally. When the dollar strengthens against your currency, the portion of your income arriving in dollars buys more of that life. Nothing about your work changed. Your exposure did.

Three frictions, because the slogan version of this advice helps nobody. Dollar income is genuinely hard to come by and is not open to everyone, rationed by skill, network and timing. Receiving it carries its own costs, meaning domiciliary accounts, remittance fees and whatever the CBN rules say that quarter. And the hedge cuts both ways, because a weakening dollar reverses the benefit. The point is not to bet on the dollar. It is to stop being fully exposed to one currency. That is the whole argument behind why we publish this.

"Hire from Nigeria", launched on 31 August through NATEP, exists to make the first of those frictions smaller. It targets a million export-linked jobs by 2030 and goes in front of global employers at the UN General Assembly on 24 September. Whether it works is a 2030 question. Whether you use it is a this-quarter question.