By James Woods*
On the morning of 28 February 2026, the world changed, again without asking Africa’s permission. Joint United States and Israeli strikes targeted Iran’s military command, missile infrastructure, and senior leadership, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and triggering the most dangerous conflagration in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Tehran responded within hours, firing ballistic missiles at UAE airports, Gulf petrochemical hubs, and American military installations across Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar. The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which nearly one-fifth of the world’s daily oil supply moves, ground to a near-standstill.
This is not an African story. Except, of course, that it entirely is.
I. The Hormuz Tax
Africa did not vote on the Geneva negotiations that collapsed on 26 February. Africa had no seat in Muscat when indirect talks between Washington and Tehran broke down. Africa’s governments were not consulted when President Trump issued his ten-day ultimatum, nor when Operation Epic Fury was authorised. And yet Africa, 54 nations, 1.4 billion people, the world’s youngest and fastest-growing population, is now paying a tax it never agreed to levy on itself.
Call it the Hormuz Tax.
Within 48 hours of the first strikes, crude oil markets surged in their sharpest single-session move in four years. Brent crude, which opened the week near $73 per barrel, vaulted toward $88 as insurers cancelled cover for Hormuz transit, shipping premiums hit a six-year high, and commercial operators suspended sailings through the Gulf. Analysts at ING have warned that a prolonged conflict could send prices toward $100–$140 per barrel, a level that would constitute a catastrophic supply shock for import-dependent African economies.
For the majority of African nations that import petroleum products, this is not an abstraction. In Kenya, the government has spent years managing the balance between fuel subsidy liabilities and a current account already strained by a weak shilling. As reported this week, higher crude prices translate directly into higher pump prices for petrol, diesel, and kerosene, driving up transport costs, pushing food prices upward, and intensifying pressure on household budgets already at breaking point. In Ethiopia, Malawi, Senegal, and Tanzania, the calculus is identical. The fuel price is not merely a market signal; it determines whether children eat, whether smallholder farmers can bring crops to market, and whether public services can sustain their fuel-dependent logistics.
II. The Remittance Corridor Under Fire
The second channel of the Hormuz Tax is less visible but no less devastating: the Gulf remittance corridor.
Millions of Africans live and work across the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait, the precise countries that now sit at the epicentre of Iranian retaliation. Ghana alone received approximately $3.09 billion in remittances in 2025, representing 3.7 percent of the country’s GDP, with a significant share originating from Ghanaian nationals in countries now under active missile threat. Nigeria, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe face parallel vulnerabilities.
The World Bank has long identified Middle East conflict escalation as one of the primary downside risks to remittance flows, through both the physical disruption of Gulf host economies and the reduced economic activity that conflict invariably generates. Globally, officially recorded remittances to low- and middle-income countries reached nearly $700 billion in 2024. For millions of African households, these transfers are not discretionary income. They are the primary bulwark against destitution. A sustained Gulf crisis does not merely slow an inflow, it extinguishes a lifeline.
Ghana’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs activated an emergency preparedness plan on 28 February, directing citizens across five Gulf states to remain indoors. The broader diplomatic apparatus of Africa, the African Union, ECOWAS, SADC, was not mobilised in any preventive sense. It reacted. As it always does. After the fact.
III. The Food Security Multiplier
Energy prices do not travel alone. They carry food prices, freight costs, fertiliser import bills, and manufacturing inputs in their wake.
ECOWAS issued a stark warning this week that the Hormuz crisis threatens to increase energy prices, block critical trade routes, accelerate inflation, and intensify food insecurity across West Africa. More than ten African states, including Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Chad, Sudan, Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, and South Africa, have formally called for restraint. Their voices, predictably, have not altered the tempo of Operation Epic Fury by a single sortie.
For landlocked economies in the Sahel, the consequences are compounded by geography. As the Common Fund for Commodities has observed, in Niger and Chad, livestock and agricultural exports depend on long overland corridors crossing multiple borders. Higher fuel prices simultaneously increase trucking costs, border transit expenses, and domestic food prices, delivering a double economic shock that can render export markets entirely inaccessible. Geography already imposes a structural penalty on these nations. Conflict elsewhere magnifies it without mercy.
Africa entered 2026 already carrying the structural scars of COVID-19 supply chain fractures, the Russia-Ukraine food shock of 2022, and the debt distress that followed. The continent’s central banks had, with considerable discipline, begun an easing cycle intended to stimulate growth and stabilise currencies. Bloomberg has now flagged that the Iran war oil shock directly threatens to derail that easing cycle, forcing monetary authorities into an impossible choice between defending inflation targets and supporting growth. It is a dilemma that Washington and Tel Aviv did not factor into their strike packages. It is one that African citizens will feel in every market, every taxi fare, every school canteen.
IV. The Architecture of Absence
There is a structural truth at the heart of this crisis that the diplomatic community has been reluctant to name plainly: Africa is perpetually the collateral damage of wars it has no hand in starting, no seat in negotiating, and no institutional buffer against absorbing.
The nuclear talks that failed, held in Muscat and Geneva under Omani mediation, had no African observer. The UN Security Council framework that governs the legal architecture of these strikes involves no African permanent member. The House of Commons Library’s definitive briefing on Operation Epic Fury makes no mention of African multilateral input. The IAEA, which confirmed as late as 2 March that it had no indication nuclear installations had been hit, operates under a governance structure in which Africa’s voice is structurally marginalised.
This is not a conspiracy. It is an architecture. And it is one that Africa must now consciously and urgently choose to dismantle.
The Atlantic Council and Washington’s foreign policy establishment will frame this conflict through the lens of nuclear non-proliferation, Israeli security, and American strategic interest. Each of those framings has merit. None of them is the African framing and none of them will protect a Kenyan smallholder, a Ghanaian remittance recipient, or a Chadian transport operator from the consequences of a war they did not choose.
V. What Africa Must Decide — Now
The Hormuz Tax will eventually be paid. The question for Africa’s leadership is whether this moment, painful and politically inconvenient as it is, catalyses a fundamentally different strategic posture. Three imperatives present themselves.
First: energy sovereignty must move from aspiration to emergency policy. Africa holds vast hydrocarbon reserves, Nigeria, Angola, Mozambique, Senegal, Uganda and extraordinary renewable energy potential that remains almost entirely unharnessed for domestic consumption. The AfCFTA’s energy protocols must be treated with the same urgency as the military situation in the Gulf. An Africa that cannot fuel itself from its own resources will forever be subject to a Hormuz Tax, imposed by strangers, collected from its own people.
Second: the remittance corridor must be diplomatically protected and structurally diversified. African governments must immediately engage Gulf states, which, facing their own disruption from Iranian strikes, have powerful incentives for partnership, to establish worker protection frameworks and emergency financial continuity mechanisms. The diaspora is not merely a social phenomenon; it is critical financial infrastructure. It must be treated as such.
Third: non-alignment must become strategic, not ceremonial. Africa’s principled refusal to take sides in great power conflicts is admirable, but it has too often meant passivity. A continent of 1.4 billion people, home to 60 percent of the world’s remaining arable land and the critical minerals that power the 21st-century economy, cannot afford to be a spectator in the geopolitical theatre. The African Union must develop a doctrine of active non-alignment: diplomatic assertiveness that conditions African cooperation, on minerals, on migration, on military basing rights, on explicit protections against the economic spillover of conflicts that Africa did not choose.
Conclusion
The 1973 oil crisis taught the world that energy is geopolitics. Fifty years on, Africa is still learning that lesson, still paying the price at the pump, at the port, at the market stall, for decisions made in Washington, Tel Aviv, and Tehran.
The Strait of Hormuz will eventually reopen. The tankers will sail. The insurance premiums will normalise. The think-tanks of Washington and London will declare that the worst-case scenario was avoided.
But in Nairobi, in Accra, in Lilongwe, in Kigali, in Bamako, the Hormuz Tax will continue to be collected, in higher bread prices, in depreciated currencies, in deferred rate cuts, in shattered remittance transfers, and in the quiet, unrecorded suffering of families who will never know the name of the strait whose closure rearranged their lives.
Africa must decide that enough is enough. Not with anger, but with strategy. Not with rhetoric, but with architecture. The world will not give the continent a seat at its most consequential tables. Africa must build its own.
*James Woods is a strategic communications and geopolitics specialist and former senior Malawian diplomat accredited to the Kingdom of Belgium, the European Union and multiple European states. He has advised presidents, governments, multilateral institutions, and FTSE- and NASDAQ-listed companies across Africa, Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. An Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellow, he is co-founder of GQI, a strategic intelligence and advisory practice, and a Partner at Rainbow World Group, a Pan-African investment holding group. He holds an Executive MBA from the University of Oxford and a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics.
