On the morning of February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated airstrikes on Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and triggering a wave of retaliatory missiles and drones across the Gulf. Within days, the Strait of Hormuz through which approximately 20 percent of the world’s daily oil supply travels was effectively shut down. Shipping traffic through the waterway fell by 90 percent.
Major container lines including Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, and CMA CGM suspended all Gulf and Red Sea transits. Global oil prices surged by more than 25 percent in the first week alone.
Africa did not start this war. Africa was not consulted. And yet, within hours of the first strikes, Africa was already paying for it.
The conflict between the United States, Israel, and Iran is the most dangerous escalation the Middle East has seen in a generation. It has drawn in Hezbollah, threatened the Gulf Cooperation Council states, and rattled global markets from London to Lagos.
Talk of a third world war is no longer the preserve of alarmists; it has entered the vocabulary of serious analysts. For Africa, standing at the intersection of multiple overlapping vulnerabilities, the question is not whether this war affects us. It already does. The question is whether Africa will navigate this crisis as a passive victim or as a continent with strategic intelligence and the will to use it.
What Africa Stands to Lose
The immediate economic consequences for Africa are significant, uneven, and in some cases already irreversible for the households bearing them.
The first shock is energy. Oil prices have risen sharply since the start of the conflict, with Goldman Sachs warning of a breach above $100 per barrel if Hormuz disruptions continue. For Africa’s majority oil-importing nations, including Ghana, Kenya, Ethiopia, and most of the Sahel this translates directly into higher fuel costs, transport inflation, and widening fiscal deficits.
Ghana, which has been painstakingly managing an IMF-supported fiscal consolidation, now faces renewed inflationary pressure from an external shock entirely outside its control. In Nigeria, where the government had only recently removed fuel subsidies, pump prices rose by an estimated 14 percent in the first week of the conflict.
The second shock is trade. With the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed and Houthi threats resuming in the Red Sea, global shipping has rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope. The detour adds between 3,500 and 4,000 nautical miles to Asia-Europe and Asia-Africa routes, extending delivery times by 10 to 20 days and driving freight costs up by 40 percent or more. Emergency conflict surcharges of $2,000 to $4,000 per container are being imposed by major lines.
East African ports like Mombasa are facing delayed arrivals of machinery, electronics, grain, and edible oils. West Africa, including Ghana, faces elevated landed costs across a wide range of imports. For economies already grappling with debt, weakened currencies, and thin fiscal buffers, this is not an inconvenience. It is a structural setback.
The third vulnerability is geopolitical. Several African countries host US military infrastructure. Djibouti’s Camp Lemonnier, housing approximately 4,000 American personnel, sits fewer than 160 kilometres from Houthi-controlled Yemen. Somaliland’s Berbera port, operated by the UAE now itself a target of Iranian missile strikes, lies near the southern Red Sea entrance. The Horn of Africa, already deeply unstable from conflicts in Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia, risks being drawn closer to a theatre of great power violence that its institutions are not designed to withstand.
Diplomatically, Africa’s response has so far been inadequate. The African Union Commission Chairperson issued a statement on February 28 calling for restraint and dialogue, appropriate in tone but insufficient in substance. Analysts at Amani Africa have pointed out that the AU’s statement failed to name the initial strikes as a potential violation of international law, instead adopting a posture of false equivalence between an aggressor and its target. This is a pattern the AU has repeated across multiple crises.
A continent of 1.4 billion people, representing 54 states and a growing share of global population, cannot afford to speak to the world’s most consequential conflicts in language so careful it says nothing.
What Africa Stands to Gain
And yet, crisis is rarely uniform in its effects. The same disruption that harms import-dependent economies in West and East Africa creates real, tangible opportunities for others, and if managed collectively, for the continent as a whole.
The most visible opportunity is in energy. Africa’s oil and gas producers, Nigeria, Angola, Libya, Algeria, Equatorial Guinea, and the Republic of Congo among them, find themselves in a position of sudden global relevance. Analysts at Energy Capital and Power have noted that Angola’s deepwater projects, Libya’s 2026 licensing round, and Nigeria’s investment incentives under the Petroleum Industry Act all present openings to scale production and lock in long-term supply contracts with energy-hungry buyers in Europe and Asia now desperately diversifying away from Middle Eastern sources.
If the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz persists, the pressure on European and Asian economies to secure alternative oil and gas supplies will intensify. Africa’s upstream energy sector has rarely had a more compelling moment to attract investment.
The geographic opportunity is equally striking. Cape of Good Hope transit saw a 35 percent increase in vessel calls in the first days of the conflict. Ports at Durban and Cape Town are already reporting a surge in bunkering and provisioning demand. If this rerouting becomes extended or semi-permanent, it transforms southern Africa from a peripheral maritime node into a critical global logistics hub.
For South Africa, Mozambique, and other Indian Ocean economies, the question is whether they can invest rapidly enough in port infrastructure, bunkering capacity, and logistics services to capture the long-term value of this shift rather than simply absorbing its short-term transit.
There is a third, less material but strategically critical opportunity: Africa’s non-alignment dividend. As the United States, its European allies, China, and Russia navigate a world war they are all careful not to name, every region not yet committed to a side holds leverage. Africa’s historical experience with the Non-Aligned Movement is not nostalgia.
It is institutional memory that can be converted into diplomatic capital. Countries that can credibly say “we have no automatic loyalty” to any great power bloc become valuable interlocutors, mediators, and swing votes in international forums. Africa has 54 UN votes. In a world where the rules-based order is fracturing and great powers are competing for legitimacy as much as territory, that is not nothing.
What Africa Must Do to Emerge Victoriously
Opportunity is not destiny. Africa’s history is filled with moments where the structural conditions for a breakthrough existed but the political will and continental coordination to capture it did not. This moment requires a different response.
First, the African Union must find its voice, and it must be a principled one. Calling for restraint is not leadership. Leadership means naming violations of international law clearly, articulating Africa’s specific interests in the conflict’s resolution, and mobilising the continent’s diplomatic weight in international forums including the UN Security Council reform process that African states have long demanded. The AU’s silence or timidity in moments like this weakens not only its credibility but Africa’s collective leverage in every negotiation that follows.
Second, the African Continental Free Trade Area must be accelerated, not deferred. The single most important lesson of this crisis for Africa is the danger of import dependency. Economies that rely on Middle Eastern shipping corridors for food, fuel, and manufactured goods are exposed to disruptions they cannot control. Deepening intra-African trade, building regional value chains, and reducing dependency on external supply routes is not an abstract aspiration. It is a concrete risk-management strategy. Every month of delay in AfCFTA implementation is a month of retained vulnerability.
Third, African oil producers must think and act collectively. Nigeria’s structural weakness, a net oil exporter that remains a net importer of refined fuels due to inadequate refining capacity is a symbol of the broader failure to translate resource wealth into processed value.
The current moment, with oil prices elevated and global buyers anxious, is precisely the window to accelerate refinery investment, negotiate long-term supply contracts at favourable terms, and redirect oil revenues into the energy infrastructure that would reduce the continent’s own import bills. Acting alone, individual African producers will capture some windfall. Acting collectively, they can reshape their structural position in global energy markets.
Fourth, and most fundamentally, Africa must practice what might be called active non-alignment, not the passive silence of a continent waiting to see who wins, but the deliberate, principled positioning of a bloc that refuses to be conscripted into other people’s wars. This means engaging diplomatically with all parties, Washington, Tehran, Beijing, Brussels while maintaining the independence to speak honestly to each.
It means proposing African-led mediation initiatives where credible. It means refusing military bases and bilateral security deals that would compromise the continent’s neutrality. And it means building the institutional architecture of AU security and diplomacy so that Africa’s position is backed by something more than rhetoric.
The fire burning across the Middle East horizon is not Africa’s fire. But its smoke reaches every African city, port, and household. The continent is already absorbing its costs. The question is whether Africa will also claim its opportunities, and whether its leaders have the strategic clarity and collective will to turn a global crisis into a continental turning point.
History will not wait. The window for non-alignment leverage, energy diplomacy, and trade diversification is open now, precisely because the world is distracted and desperate. Africa has been here before: present at the margins of other people’s catastrophes, waiting to be consulted, waiting to be included, waiting for the world to recognise its value.
This time, Africa should not wait. It should move.
By Obed Kog
The writer is a Graduate Student in International Relations and Diplomacy, GIMPA, and Public Policy Analyst
