The Russia-Ukraine war exposed Africa’s dependence on imported wheat. The US-Iran war is now exposing its dependence on imported oil, fertilisers and the goodwill of foreign shipping lanes.
Each crisis arrives like a report card — and the grade has not changed. The continent that holds 60% of the world’s uncultivated arable land and 30% of its mineral reserves cannot feed itself reliably, power itself consistently or finance its own infrastructure at the required scale. The question is not whether Africa will face the next external shock. It is whether it will meet that shock with the same structural vulnerabilities it has carried for decades.
The African Development Bank estimates that Africa requires $130bn-$170bn per year in infrastructure financing, with the annual funding gap now at $68bn-$108bn (AfDB, 2023). The Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development’s (OECD’s) Africa’s Development Dynamics 2025 report estimated $155bn in annual investment will be needed to double Africa’s GDP by 2040.
Africa invests just 4% of its GDP in infrastructure, compared with 14% in China, and governments spend on average seven times more on debt service than on infrastructure. This is not a development shortfall; it is a structural fragility, one that every geopolitical tremor converts into a household crisis.
When Ukraine burned, Africa went hungry
Russia and Ukraine together accounted for 27% of global wheat trade before the February 2022 invasion. African nations, particularly those in north and east Africa, sourced 38%-45% of their wheat imports from Ukraine alone. When Black Sea ports closed, global wheat prices surged more than 50% within weeks. Maize prices rose 47%.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation projected that undernourished people globally could increase by 8-million to 13-million, with Sub-Saharan Africa absorbing a disproportionate share, and research in Scientific Reports estimated 307 additional deaths per million per year from associated food insecurity. Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer, faced a direct threat to its subsidised bread programme serving more than 70-million people. Africa’s lesson from 2022 was not that it was unlucky. It was that it had no buffer.
When Hormuz closes, Africa pays
On February 28 the US and Israel launched operations against Iran. By March 4 Iran had in effect closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20% of the world’s seaborne oil and liquefied natural gas normally transit. Daily tanker passages dropped from 135 to about 10. Brent crude prices climbed toward $95 a barrel, with analysts warning of a breach above $100 if the blockade held. The International Energy Agency described it as the greatest global energy security challenge in history.
For Africa’s predominantly oil-importing economies the damage transmits simultaneously through higher transport costs, rising agricultural input prices, electricity pressures and currency depreciation. The Hormuz closure has also disrupted the supply of sulphur, urea and ammonia, commodities accounting for roughly 50% of global urea and sulphur exports.
For a continent where fertiliser access is already among the world’s lowest, a sustained Gulf supply shock is a food security event in slow motion. The IMF’s April 2026 update cut the Middle East and North Africa growth forecast by 2.8 percentage points, with the transmission channels into African economies direct and well-established.
The pattern is not a co-incidence
Two wars. Two continents. Both times, the damage to Africa has been routed through the same chokepoints: food, energy, fertiliser and freight. This is not bad luck. It is a structural signature. Africa is predominantly a price-taker in global commodity markets, a supplier of raw materials with limited strategic reserves, constrained domestic refining capacity and infrastructure that costs more to use than anywhere else on earth.
Energy costs for African manufacturers run up to four times higher than in comparable markets; road freight tariffs are double those in the US; poor infrastructure has reduced annual GDP growth by up to two percentage points. Africa’s public debt grew by nearly 170% to more than $1.8-trillion between 2010 and 2024, with median debt service rising from 3.5% to 12% of government expenditure, resources that cannot simultaneously finance the infrastructure gap.
What must change
Three priorities are both urgent and achievable:
- Investment in domestic food production and storage must be treated as a security imperative; the continent cannot afford another disruption, holding just 20-40 days of staple food cover.
- Energy diversification spanning renewables, gas and strategic reserves must move from policy documents to funded implementation; repeated exposure to oil price shocks is the accumulated cost of deferred investment decisions.
- Regional port and logistics infrastructure must be strengthened to enable supply chain substitution at speed, a capacity that cannot be improvised during a crisis.
The OECD estimates that $155bn invested annually in African infrastructure until 2040 would add $2.83-trillion to the continent’s GDP. African pension funds alone hold about $1.8-trillion in assets, most of it invested outside the continent. Redirecting even a fraction toward bankable infrastructure projects is not idealism; it is the most rational allocation available.
The infrastructure gap is not a number in an African Development Bank report. It is the mechanism through which foreign wars become domestic emergencies. Two wars have now issued the same warning. The question is whether the urgency of this moment is finally sufficient to change the pace of the response.
• Panashe is head of knowledge & insights at Old Mutual Zimbabwe. She writes in her personal capacity.
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