War in the Persian Gulf is once again exposing Africa’s weak shock absorbers. We are not an island; a continent plugged into global energy, shipping and finance will always feel tremors that begin elsewhere.
Inevitably this should not be the fate of such a resource-rich continent.
Agenda 2063 commits Africa to self-reliance and structural transformation. That promise matters only if we build the capacity to keep essentials moving and prices stable when the world becomes unstable.
The US, Israel–Iran confrontation has disrupted shipping routes and tightened crude oil markets —an unavoidable input cost for many African economies.
Constraints on supply of petrochemicals, including fertilisers and mining chemical inputs, could disrupt production as well as increase production costs.
The fastest transmission channel is familiar. Higher pump prices feed into transport costs and then into the price of food and services, squeezing households and profit margins of firms.
We have seen this played out before.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent food, fertiliser and fuel prices soaring; Covid-19 exposed how quickly supply chains can snap.
Each time, Africa catches a cold when distant places sneeze. The spillovers are repetitive and by now, predictable. The real problem is not the shock; it is how slow we are to reduce our exposure, despite years of pledges to integrate markets and industrialise.
Development banks and international financial institutions will, as usual, publish careful assessments of price transmission and growth impacts.
The studies have value. Yet they can also function like a soothing ointment applied to a deep wound.
The harder question is structural: Why does a continent with abundant hydrocarbons, minerals, land and labour remain so exposed to exogenous shocks?
Until we confront the policy choices that keep Africa selling raw materials and buying back refined products (sometimes from the same raw materials), every new crisis will look like a continent stuck in a design flaw.
Consider oil. Africa’s combined crude production in 2025 averaged about 8.3 million barrels a day, yet roughly three-quarters of production were exported.
The continent imported about 2.5 million to 3.0 million barrels a day of refined petroleum products. In 2024, Africa spent about $120 billion on refined petroleum imports.
That crude-export–refined-import dichotomy is more than a trade statistic; it is a self-inflicted vulnerability.
When global prices jump, the first casualty is not only inflation. It is the missed opportunity to build refining, petrochemicals and logistics industries that would cushion shocks and keep value at home.
Oil is only the tip of the iceberg. With few exceptions, the same logic governs minerals and agriculture: Africa exports what it grows or digs and imports what it consumes.
The global cocoa value chain, for instance, is estimated at $120bn to $150bn a year. Yet cocoa farmers — about 5.5 million people, many in Africa — receive only 7% to 10% of the final value.
Ten percent of $150bn is $15bn spread across millions of producers: roughly $1 500 to 2000 a year before overhead and other administrative costs are deducted. This is another picture of a fragile continent.
Exposure is compounded by the paucity of cross-border infrastructure. Europe’s road and rail systems were built as networks: country lines connect into a continental grid.
Much of Africa’s infrastructure, by contrast, remains nationally oriented and historically designed to move commodities from hinterlands to ports.
Subregional and regional plans too often arrive late, as add-ons rather than the thrust of development strategy. Inter-country rail remains limited, with stronger clusters mainly in Eastern and Southern Africa, leaving too many producers and consumers trapped behind high internal transport costs.
Even where surpluses exist, they cannot move quickly to offset shortages elsewhere. Firms stay confined to small national markets and never reach the scale that makes manufacturing competitive.
Governments then mimic inward-looking industrial policies that struggle against imports, especially under open trade.
Africa has a blueprint to break the cycle — Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa’s (Pida) regional corridors and the African Union’s action plan for boosting intra-African trade. The task now is execution: align national plans with Regional Economic Communities’ (RECs) programmes and continental priorities and make cross-border infrastructure a first-order financing choice for regional development banks and international financial institutions.
Infrastructure alone will not deliver resilience if Africa remains a maze of fragmented rules.
The Persian Gulf shock again reveals how a multiplicity of national laws, standards and licensing regimes turns borders into bottlenecks.
Even when a road exists, trucks can lose days to duplicative inspections, non-recognised certificates and discretionary charges.
The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) was negotiated to confront the obstacles by disciplining non-tariff barriers, technical barriers to trade, sanitary and phytosanitary measures and transit.
Implementation should be fulfilled with full commitment. A continental market cannot function as 54 small markets stitched together by paperwork.
Then there is the issue of involvement of the private sector.
Resilience will be built by enterprises that refine, process, transport and insure products; and by investors willing to back long-term projects. That requires deliberate policy: predictable regulation, credible dispute resolution, bankable project pipelines and reliable market access. Where the conditions align, scale follows.
The Dangote refinery in Nigeria offers a reminder that African ambition can materialise when the enabling environment and project size meet.
AfCFTA’s promise is to replicate Dangote-like transformative industries across the continent across multiple sectors.
What should change after this crisis? Three priorities stand out.
First, align national, REC and continental institutions around shared infrastructure norms and regulations, as envisaged under Agenda 2063 and Pida; Auda-Nepad should be empowered to coordinate implementation and to discourage projects that break corridor connectivity.
Second, accelerate the physical links identified — pipelines, roads, rail, bridges and power interconnectors — and operationalise the Single African Air Transport Market to cut the cost of moving people and high-value goods.
Third, crowd in African wealth and entrepreneurs to build industries to scale by making rules predictable and markets integrated: regulatory coherence, investable project pipelines and the rule of law that lets capital plan for continental demand.
If Africa does these things, distant sneezes will be heard but will no longer bring the continent to its knees.
Anthony Ohemeng-Boamah is a staff member of the UN Development Programme. He is an expert on helping countries overcome development challenges.
The Dangote refinery in Nigeria offers a reminder that African ambition can materialise when the enabling environment and project size meet. AfCFTA’s promise is to replicate Dangote-like transformative industries across the continent across multiple sectors.
