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Sub-Saharan Africa has spent decades building its economic future on supply chains it does not control. This series examines what happens when those chains break. The trigger is the 2026 Gulf crisis, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz following joint US-Israeli military strikes on Iran in late February, and the most severe disruption to global energy and commodity flows since the 1970s oil embargo. But the crisis is, in a real sense, just the latest chapter in a longer story about structural vulnerability.
15 April 26
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The thread running through the series is that the crisis that arrived in March 2026 was not unforeseeable. Structural warnings, from COVID-19’s supply chain chaos in 2020, from the Russia-Ukraine fertiliser and energy shock of 2022, from the Houthi Red Sea disruptions of 2024, were visible early on. Each shock left the same lesson unlearned: Africa’s dependence on a small number of suppliers, transiting a small number of chokepoints, through contracts designed for stable conditions, is a strategic liability. This series is written in the conviction that the crisis now unfolding must be the last one for which Africa is this unprepared.
Contracts, Crises and Chokepoints
Opens with the story: what happened, in what sequence, and what it has set in motion. It then examines the structural conditions that made Africa so exposed — the refining deficit, the fertiliser dependency, the cost Africa pays year after year for this configuration — before turning to the legal architecture that now governs the response. Force majeure, war risk, pricing mechanisms, and the regulatory trap of governments caught between rising costs and IMF and lender conditionality are live legal questions with real answers in your contracts, and this article is designed to help you find them.
How the Gulf Crisis Translates into African Realities
Moves country by country. Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Zambia and the landlocked economies of the interior each face the crisis differently, shaped by their geography, their fiscal position, and the degree to which governments have built, or failed to build, any buffer against precisely this kind of shock. The downstream consequences, political as much as economic, are mapped with the specificity that sound decision-making requires.
Beyond Oil: Fertiliser, Food Security and Systemic Exposure
Addresses the crisis that will outlast the current one. The disruption to global fertiliser supply chains is slower to arrive than a fuel price spike, but potentially more damaging. When a farmer cannot access fertiliser during planting season, the lost harvest cannot be recovered by a ceasefire. The structural investments needed to break Africa’s fertiliser dependency — and the legal and financial architecture required to support them are the subject of this final article.