ABUJA — Nigeria’s finance ministry began circulating a revised set of fiscal assumptions to cabinet colleagues over the weekend after Brent crude slid toward $95 a barrel in the wake of the Iran ceasefire, exposing a 2026 budget benchmark that officials had quietly bet would hold above $100 through the second quarter.

The internal memo, described to reporters Sunday by two officials familiar with its contents, acknowledges that the federal budget signed in late January assumed an average realized price of $78 a barrel and production of 1.78 million barrels a day, an arithmetic that had appeared comfortable through the six weeks of war but now looks tighter as crude unwinds its risk premium and refiners across Asia rebalance their April loadings. The memo, the officials said, models a base case in which Brent averages $94 across the second quarter and a downside case at $88, with the latter triggering a roughly 1.3 trillion-naira shortfall in oil-linked revenue against the budget’s funding plan.

“The good news is that we no longer have a war,” Finance Minister Wale Edun said in a brief statement Sunday evening, his first public comment since the prisoner exchange in Doha on Friday. “The harder news is that the war was, for a few weeks, masking a structural problem. We are returning to the conversation we were having in February, only with less time and a thinner buffer.”

The structural problem Edun referred to is familiar to anyone who has tracked Nigerian public finance over the last decade. Crude output remains below the country’s OPEC quota of 1.5 million barrels a day, with the official rig count slipping in March and theft and pipeline vandalism in the Niger Delta still draining an estimated 80,000 to 120,000 barrels a day according to industry surveys. The naira, which strengthened modestly during the war as global investors retreated from risk, has begun to soften again, trading near 1,520 to the dollar in the parallel market on Friday. And debt servicing, which consumed roughly 38 percent of federal revenue in the first quarter, is on pace to exceed projections if benchmark yields do not ease alongside oil.

Adesola Bakare, a Lagos-based fixed income strategist at Stanbic IBTC, said the post-ceasefire repricing had been brutally quick. “For five weeks, Nigerian Eurobonds were trading like a beneficiary,” Bakare said in a telephone interview. “You had high oil, a weaker dollar, and a flight from Middle East risk that flattered the credit. Since Tuesday all three of those tailwinds have reversed at once. The market is now asking what the fiscal anchor actually is, and that question is the one Abuja was hoping not to have to answer this quarter.”

The April 1 OPEC+ decision to add roughly 1.5 million barrels a day of production was central to the squeeze. Nigeria, along with Angola and Algeria, had pressed during the Vienna session for a smaller and more conditional increase, citing the difficulty of capturing additional revenue while domestic output remained constrained. The eventual communique split the difference, allowing Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to raise barrels quickly while leaving lower-quota African producers with a paper allocation they could not in practice fill. The result, several analysts said, has been to compress prices without giving Lagos or Luanda the volumes to offset the move.

Ibrahim Lukman, an Abuja-based economist at the Centre for the Study of the Economies of Africa, said the dynamic exposed the limits of Nigeria’s bargaining position inside the cartel. “We were arguing for a price floor we could live with,” Lukman said. “What we got was a ceiling we cannot reach. That is a hard outcome to explain to the appropriations committee, and the appropriations committee is going to want to see the working.”

The political backdrop is delicate. President Bola Tinubu, in office since 2023, has spent political capital on fuel subsidy removal and on the partial unification of the naira’s exchange rates, both of which have raised the consumer price level sharply and squeezed urban incomes. Public patience for further fiscal tightening is thin. Two governors from the southwest, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal party deliberations, said the All Progressives Congress would resist any move to defer revenue-sharing transfers to states, which would be the easiest near-term adjustment for federal accounts but politically combustible ahead of the off-cycle gubernatorial contests later this year.

The central bank has so far signaled a wait-and-see posture. Governor Olayemi Cardoso, in remarks at a Lagos conference Wednesday before the ceasefire took hold, said the Central Bank of Nigeria’s policy rate, currently at 27.5 percent, would remain restrictive “for as long as the inflation trajectory requires.” Officials at the bank declined further comment over the weekend. Headline inflation eased to 28.4 percent in March, the second consecutive monthly decline, and Cardoso has hinted at the possibility of a first cut by midyear if the disinflation trend held.

Beyond the immediate budget math, the ceasefire has reshuffled a set of regional calculations. Nigerian crude grades — Bonny Light, Forcados, Qua Iboe — had commanded narrow premiums during the war as Asian refiners sought reliable West African supply outside the Gulf risk corridor. Trading desks in Geneva and Singapore said those premiums had largely evaporated by Friday, with several May-loading cargoes offered at flat to dated Brent or slight discounts. The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, which markets the federation’s equity barrels, declined to comment on pricing.

In Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal, all of which began producing modest volumes of crude or condensate in recent years, finance officials offered cautiously positive readings. A Ghanaian Treasury official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the assessments were preliminary, said Accra’s 2026 budget had assumed $74 a barrel and remained comfortably inside its envelope. Senegalese officials made similar comments about the Sangomar field’s contribution to the national treasury, which had been bolstered by higher prices through March.

For Abuja, the path forward is narrower. The finance memo, the officials said, recommends three near-term steps: accelerating planned Eurobond issuance into the second quarter rather than the third, expanding domestic borrowing through the Federal Government of Nigeria securities program, and reopening discussions with multilateral lenders on a contingent financing facility that had been shelved in February when oil rallied. None of the three is politically attractive, and all three have already been used heavily in the last two years.

A senior official in the presidency, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the cabinet would meet Tuesday to consider the options and that a formal announcement could come later in the week. Officials said additional measures, including a possible mid-year supplementary appropriation, would be considered if Brent did not stabilize above $95 by the end of the month.