The strike, which entered its third day today, shut down banks, businesses and ports across the West African nation, limited the trade in stocks and the naira. While the action hasn’t slowed oil exports from Africa’s top crude producer, pumped by companies such as Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA) and Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM), it may have cost 320 billion naira ($2 billion) in economic output, said Bismarck Rewane, chief executive officer of Financial Derivatives Co.

“It’s mind boggling the cost” to the economy, he said by phone from Lagos today. “The foreign-exchange markets are down” and “the stock market is operating at about less than 5 or 10 percent of its optimal turnover and transactions.”

Jonathan, who won a four-year term in April, has pledged to use savings from the 1.2 trillion naira subsidy to invest in power plants and roads in sub-Saharan Africa’s second-largest economy. At the same time he faces an increase in religious violence in parts of the north where he has declared a state of emergency and says Islamist militants pose a worse threat to the country than the 1967-70 civil war. [img]