• Fuel prices have increased, with diesel rising to $2.05/litre and petrol blend to $2.17/litre, despite Brent crude oil prices falling below $100/bbl
• The price hike is driven by a combination of global import costs and domestic levies, which add a structural floor to Zimbabwe's pump prices
• The increase has pushed Zimbabwe to have the second-highest fuel prices in Sub-Saharan Africa, behind only Malawi, highlighting the impact of taxes and levies on the country's fuel costs

 Harare-  Zimbabwe Energy Regulatory Authority raised fuel prices on 18 March 2026, pushing diesel to $2.05 per litre and petrol blend to $2.17 per litre,  increases of 15.8% and 26.9% respectively on the prices that had been set earlier in the month.

The announcement arrived in the same week that Brent crude oil retreated from above $100 per barrel, where it had been sitting on the back of the US-Israel strikes on Iran and the Hormuz disruption premium, to below $95.

Oil got cheaper, but Zimbabwe's pump price went up. That sequence is not a coincidence or a data anomaly, but a product of a fuel pricing architecture that has been systematically loaded with levies, taxes, and cost premiums that now account for a structural floor in Zimbabwe's pump price, a floor that moves independently of what happens on the international crude market.

The regional context makes the numbers more uncomfortable than they already are. Across the Sub-Saharan African markets, Zimbabwe still ranks second only to Malawi on fuel prices. The countries that sit below Zimbabwe on that table include South Africa, Zambia, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Angola, most of which are larger economies with greater fuel import volumes, more developed logistics infrastructure, and in some cases domestic hydrocarbon production that reduces their exposure to the landed cost of imported crude.

Zimbabwe has none of those advantages and all of their disadvantages, compounded by a structural levy burden that the ZERA price build-up sheet makes visible in precise and damaging detail.

The FOB price for Diesel 50, the international import cost,  rose from $1.0600 in the early March build-up to $1.3638 in the 18 March schedule. That $0.30 per litre increase reflects the oil price conditions that prevailed over the import procurement cycle, and it is a legitimate global cost pass-through.

On that basis alone, a price increase was justified. The problem is what comes next in the build-up, because the taxes and levies do not move with the oil price, they sit on top of it, compounding every cent of import cost with a fixed additional burden that the consumer absorbs in full.

The total taxes and levies on Diesel 50 in the 18 March build-up stand at $0.4220 per litre, marginally lower than the $0.4420 in the early March schedule, a small and largely cosmetic reduction. On petrol blend, the picture is dramatically different and analytically significant, total taxes and levies on Blend E5 rose from $0.5209 in the early March schedule to $0.8570 on 18 March, an increase of $0.336 per litre in the levy component alone, on top of the import cost increase.

That $0.336 additional levy burden on petrol is larger than the entire FOB price increase on diesel. It is the primary driver of the 26.9% petrol price jump, and it deserves to be named for what it is, a deliberate expansion of the tax take on petrol at a moment when the consumer is already absorbing a significant import cost increase.

The levy line moved up. The global oil price did not make it move. That was a policy decision.

The individual levies that compose the tax stack on Zimbabwe's fuel are listed in the build-up schedule with a specificity that makes each one individually interrogable. The carbon tax sits at $0.04 per litre on both diesel and petrol. The Strategic Reserve Levy sits at $0.0570 per litre on diesel. The Zinara road levy adds $0.0200. The petroleum levy adds $0.0050. The PZL pipeline levy adds another $0.0200. Import duty adds $0.3000. Together these six items add $0.4420 to every litre of diesel before the first administrative cost, distribution cost, wholesale margin, or dealer margin is applied.

They are not one tax. They are six, applied cumulatively, each justified on a different policy rationale, and none of them subject to suspension even when the global oil price is delivering cost pressure that the consumer is already absorbing through the FOB price increase.

The carbon tax deserves specific scrutiny because its policy justification has become increasingly difficult to sustain in the current environment. A carbon tax is a pricing mechanism designed to make fossil fuel combustion reflect its environmental cost, thereby incentivising consumers and businesses to reduce consumption or switch to cleaner alternatives. The theory is sound.

The application in Zimbabwe's specific context is not. Zimbabwe is the second most expensive fuel market in Sub-Saharan Africa. The majority of the diesel being taxed under the carbon levy is not being burned in private passenger vehicles by consumers with the financial flexibility to switch to electric alternatives.

 It is being burned in generators, because the national grid is unreliable,  in haulage trucks, because the road freight network is the only viable logistics option, and in agricultural machinery,  because irrigation and processing equipment run on diesel.

These are not discretionary fuel uses. They are the structural necessities of a productive economy operating in conditions of infrastructure deficit. Applying a carbon tax to generator diesel in a country where power cuts can run to ten hours a day is not climate policy. It is a revenue instrument applied to a captive cost that the consumer cannot avoid and cannot substitute.

The ethanol blending cost embedded in the petrol build-up schedule is the structural cost anomaly that has received the least public attention and carries the most fixable reform potential. The ethanol cost in the 18 March build-up sits at $1.10 per litre, applied at a 5% blend ratio. The global market price for fuel ethanol is approximately $0.55 to $0.60 per litre.

Zimbabwe's domestic ethanol, supplied exclusively by Green Fuel and Triangle under a captive supply arrangement, costs nearly double the global rate. That premium , approximately $0.50 to $0.55 per litre of ethanol, applied to 5% of every litre of petrol sold, adds approximately $0.025 to $0.028 to the pump price of every litre of blended petrol in the country.

It is not a global cost. It is a domestic policy-protected cost. It survives because the ethanol supply market is a duopoly with no competitive pressure, the blending mandate is government-set, and the suppliers are government-linked. The reform is straightforward, open the ethanol supply to competition, allow importers to participate in the blending market, and let pricing reflect global market rates. The saving on every litre of petrol sold would be immediate and material.

The timing of the 18 March price increase, announced as Brent crude retreated from its Hormuz-driven peak above $100 toward below  $95  raises the question of whether Zimbabwe's replacement cost pricing model, which ZERA uses to calculate the FOB component of its build-up, is functioning with the symmetry it is intended to have.

The replacement cost model is designed to ensure that fuel is priced based on what it would cost to replace the current stock at current international prices, rather than at the historic cost of the stock already in country. In a rising price environment, this model passes global cost increases through to consumers quickly, which is what happened through February and early March as the Iran war premium pushed Brent above $100.

The test of the model's credibility is whether it passes price decreases through with equal speed when global prices fall. If Brent sustains below $95 through the procurement cycle that feeds the next ZERA review, the replacement cost model should produce a downward price adjustment at the next announcement.

If it does not, if the levy stack ensures that the pump price is sticky on the way down even as it moves sharply on the way up,  then the replacement cost model is functioning as a one-way ratchet rather than a genuine pass-through mechanism.

The Feruka pipeline remains the structural reform with the most direct and most calculable impact on Zimbabwe's pump price, and the longest history of being discussed without being acted upon. Zimbabwe's fuel arrives overland by road from Beira and Durban, adding a trucking cost to every litre before it reaches Msasa and the distribution network.

The CPMZ pipeline cost in the build-up, $0.0589 per litre, is what it costs to move fuel through the pipeline that does operate. A fully rehabilitated Feruka pipeline from Mutare to Harare, estimated at $200 million in capital cost, would reduce the per-litre transport cost by approximately $0.07 permanently. At Zimbabwe's current consumption heading toward 2.5 billion litres in 2026, that $0.07 saving is $175 million in annual cost relief.

Against a $200 million rehabilitation cost, the payback period is just over one year. The Feruka conversation has been had many times. The $175 million annual saving calculation has been made many times. The pipeline remains unrehabilitated. Meanwhile every litre of fuel that arrives by road carries a transport premium that Feruka would eliminate,  and that cost, like the levy stack, is borne entirely by the consumer.

The honest verdict on Zimbabwe's 18 March fuel price increase is that it contains a legitimate component and an illegitimate one. The legitimate component is the FOB price increase, global oil market conditions, the Iran war premium, and the replacement cost pricing model all justify passing through the import cost increase to consumers.

The illegitimate component is the expansion of the levy burden on petrol blend at the same time, adding $0.336 per litre in additional taxes to a product whose import cost already rose by $0.15 per litre.

Those two things happening simultaneously, in the same price announcement, represent a government using a global cost shock as cover for a domestic fiscal expansion. The consumer who drives to the pump on 18 March 2026 and pays $2.17 for a litre of petrol is absorbing both the global oil market and the Zimbabwean tax system in a single transaction. Only one of those is outside Zimbabwe's control.

ZIMBABWE FUEL PRICE BUILD-UP COMPARISON — EARLY MARCH 2026 vs 18 MARCH 2026