From Nairobi's burning barricades to Dhaka's silent generators, the same shock — and the same losers.
The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively shut since late February, when U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran — and the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — triggered Tehran's closure of the world's most important oil chokepoint. Pre-war, roughly 20% of global seaborne oil and LNG passed through it; today only a small fraction of normal traffic moves. The International Energy Agency calls it the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Brent crude has traded above $100 a barrel for months, peaking near $126. But the deepest damage is not on the trading floor. It is in the wage packet, the fuel queue and the factory line — and it is falling, almost without exception, on the people who can least absorb it.
Nairobi: A Strike Lit by a Gulf Pipeline
On May 18, Kenya's public-transport sector shut the country down. Matatu owners, truckers, boda boda riders and ride-hailing drivers walked off the job under the Transport Sector Alliance, with bonfires and uprooted guardrails blocking the roads into Nairobi. Diesel prices, Bloomberg reported, had jumped roughly 50% since the war in Iran began, after the Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority pushed pump diesel to about KSh 243 a litre and petrol above KSh 214. EPRA traced the shock directly to global supply: the average landed cost of imported diesel rose more than 20% in a single month. The state's answer was austerity dressed as discipline. President William Ruto dismissed protests as pointless and ruled out broader subsidies; his ministers warned that intervention would "burden the economy." The class arithmetic is brutal — Kenya levies seven separate charges and two taxes on fuel, among the heaviest fuel-tax loads in the world, and it is commuters, not refiners, who pay them.
Dhaka: The Seamstress Pays for the Strait
Bangladesh imports about 95% of its energy, and roughly 84% of its export earnings come from a single sector: ready-made garments. When Qatar invoked force majeure on LNG deliveries after Iranian strikes on the Ras Laffan terminal, the country's diesel reserves fell to nine days. Power cuts doubled to five hours a day. Garment factories, which employ around four million workers — most of them women from rural villages — are running at 40–60% capacity; the Bangladesh Chamber of Industries reports output down 30–40% and business costs up 35–40%. Mosammet Runa, a Dhaka garment worker quoted by the Associated Press, earns about $400 a month with her husband to support a family of six. "We are innocent people," she said. "The world should not make us victims." Meanwhile Tariqul Islam, a 53-year-old ride-share driver, told the AP he now fuels his motorbike every other day and is weighing a retreat to his village. Buyers in Europe and the United States, sensing risk, are quietly shifting orders to India, Vietnam and Cambodia — meaning the workers absorbing the energy shock may also lose the jobs that justified absorbing it.
Delhi: The Subsidy that Protects the Wealthy
India offers a different version of the same story. The Indian crude basket nearly doubled from $69 to $126 a barrel in a single month; foreign investors pulled more than $20 billion from Indian equities in the first four months of 2026; the rupee hit an all-time low. New Delhi has so far held pump prices flat — a political choice that protects motorists in the short term while quietly widening the fiscal deficit. Moody's has cut its FY27 growth forecast to 6% from 6.8%. The FAO warned that India is among the countries "most at risk" if the strait stays closed, alongside Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Somalia and Kenya, because 18% of the world's traded urea moves through Hormuz and prices are up more than 20%. Food inflation is forecast to double to 4.8% in FY27. In Noida, a major garment hub, worker protests have already broken out over wages that no longer cover the cost of living. Prime Minister Modi's response has been to urge citizens to carpool — a request more easily honored by households with cars than by the daily-wage workers walking to building sites.
The Pattern, from Manila to Berlin
The list lengthens by the week. The Philippines declared a state of emergency on March 24 as transport workers struck. Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Vietnam are rationing fuel; Vietnamese gig workers have been gutted by a doubling of pump prices. The European Central Bank warns of stagflation and pencils Germany and Italy into technical recession; British households face winter heating bills inflated by Asia's scramble for non-Hormuz LNG. Yet the U.S. president has told struggling importers to "fend for themselves" — and oil producers in Canada, Brazil and Venezuela are booking windfall profits even as their own consumers absorb the inflation.
The Hormuz crisis is sold as a story about geopolitics — sovereignty, navigation, nuclear ambitions, the rules of the sea. Read across continents, it is something simpler and uglier: a global transfer of risk downward. Sovereign wealth funds in oil-exporting states post record returns. Refining margins fatten for the largest integrated majors. Defense contractors book a generational order book. And the cost of those gains — every cent on a barrel, every taka on a diesel litre, every shilling at the pump — is metered out, with mechanical precision, to a matatu conductor in Eastlands, a stitcher in Mirpur, a delivery rider in Dhaka, a farmer in Bihar buying urea at 20% more than last spring. Wars at sea have a long history of being settled by treaty in the capitals. They are paid for, as always, on land — and almost always by the same people.