🎬Elephant fight

April 10, 2025

Good morning. If you’re receiving and opening this newsletter this morning, then our recovery plan is almost complete. We have noticeably been absent from your new-found morning routine this week due to circumstances beyond our control.

It’s a situation we’re working relentlessly on, and we anticipate only slight humps on our way back to being your escape route from that dreaded morning email from your boss.

Read away!

— Chibuike Uzor.

Currency exchange rates as of market close yesterday. Here’s what these numbers mean.

Oil price slump has Nigeria panicking

Sarah Lucy/AFP via Getty Images

When two elephants get into a scuffle, you can usually expect the grass to suffer. This time around, you’ll have to dig deeper to find the brunt bearer of the US-China tariff ping-pong game: oil. Crude traded on Wednesday at four-year lows, with Brent futures settling at $60 per barrel and WTI futures dropping to $57.

For a country like Nigeria, which earns 80% of its revenue and 95% of its foreign exchange from crude oil exports, a dip in oil prices represents significant lost income. The government’s $37 billion budget for 2025 — with its $8 billion deficit — was benchmarked against an international oil price of $75 a barrel.

What does this mean?

At the current Brent price, the projected revenue from crude oil exports could drop from $17 billion to $11 billion, according to a report from the Daily Trust.

  • A sustained shortfall would widen the budget deficit even more, meaning more borrowing and forex instability.

  • “The deficit also means most of the infrastructure projects planned in the budget will have to be abandoned or repurposed,” according to Marcel Okeke, an oil and gas analyst.

  • Investors are more likely to play the ‘look away’ game when it’ll come to putting money towards extraction efforts, especially with the higher breakeven costs.

The Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning, however, has called for speculations to simmer down, reassuring reporters on Wednesday that the government had other ways of funding the budget aside from oil.

That elephant fight meanwhile, is heating up. President Trump announced a fresh 125% tariff on Chinese imports, a retort to President Jinping’s 84% retaliation levied on US imports to China only a day prior. Trump has since announced a 90-day pause on all tariffs levied last week to allow for “negotiations and sit downs at the table.”

Good news or status quo? Despite the 14% tariff levied on Nigeria last week, not much has changed. Crude oil and gas were nominally exempted from them, and Nigeria does not export much else to the US, according to Mark Bohlund, a credit analyst at REDD Intelligence.

Meta’s weekend surprise

Anna Kim

Meta released two new Llama 4 models on Saturday: the smaller Scout, which can be used for tasks like summarizing documents, and Maverick, intended as a chatbot and assistant. The more robust Behemoth, which Zuck called the world’s “highest performing base model,” is forthcoming. A fourth, Llama 4 Reasoning, is due in the next month. Meta reportedly boosted development of its Llama models after China’s DeepSeek made a splash with its lower-cost, yet still powerful R1 and V3 models.

“We’ve all been world record holders as we were all the youngest person on the planet at one point or another.”

Around the continent

Steve Sutcliffe/Getty

  • South Sudan has backtracked on its decision to reject the US deportee earlier this week.

  • Nigeria is struggling to contain a meningitis outbreak that, so far, the authorities say has claimed at least 150 lives.

  • Three US citizens have been jailed and charged for their role in a failed coup attempt in DR Congo.

  • Cameroonian goalie Andre Onana and former Manchester United player Nemanja Matic exchanged strong opinions ahead of their Europa League clash today.

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