The reported closure of the Strait of Hormuz appears to have severed a lifeline that African nations long treated as permanent. With the Iran conflict allegedly choking off the narrow waterway through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil passes, countries across the continent may now be confronting an energy crisis that exposes decades of strategic neglect in building domestic fuel infrastructure.

The Chokepoint That Broke

The Strait of Hormuz, the 21-mile-wide passage connecting the Persian Gulf to the open ocean, is now effectively closed. Oil tankers that would normally transit the strait carrying crude from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, and the UAE are sitting idle, their cargo stranded. For energy-importing nations in Africa, this is not an inconvenience. It is an emergency.

According to Al Jazeera’s reporting, the war in Iran has created a full-blown energy shock across the African continent. Reports suggest that Kenya, Ethiopia, and Zambia may be experiencing acute fuel shortages. These are not oil-producing states. They are importers, and their supply chains ran through the Middle East.

The mechanics of the disruption are straightforward. Much of Africa’s refined fuel and crude oil supply originates in the Persian Gulf. That supply now sits on tankers that cannot move. There is no quick reroute. There is no strategic petroleum reserve of meaningful size in most African countries to draw from. The fuel simply stops arriving, and within weeks, the consequences cascade through transport, agriculture, power generation, and industry.

Nigeria’s Refinery Cannot Fill the Gap

Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil producer, operates one of the continent’s largest refineries. It is now reportedly running at maximum capacity. But the math does not work in the continent’s favor.

A single refinery, no matter how large, cannot substitute for the volumes that flowed through the Strait of Hormuz to dozens of African nations. The Dangote refinery near Lagos was designed primarily to reduce Nigeria’s own dependence on imported refined products. Scaling its output to cover continental demand was never part of the plan, and the logistics of distributing fuel from one West African coastal facility to landlocked East African nations like Ethiopia and Zambia add layers of cost and complexity.

The problem is one of architecture. Africa’s energy supply system was built on the assumption that Middle Eastern oil would always be available and affordable. Pipelines, port infrastructure, storage facilities, and refining capacity were never developed at a scale that would allow the continent to absorb a major disruption from its primary supply region. That assumption has now collapsed.

Decades of Underinvestment

The current crisis did not materialize overnight. Africa’s energy infrastructure has suffered from years of underinvestment, a pattern that left governments with few options when the supply shock hit. Refineries that were planned were never built. Refineries that were built often operated below capacity due to poor maintenance, corruption, or lack of feedstock. Storage facilities that could have provided a buffer against supply disruptions were never constructed at adequate scale.

Consider the structural deficit. Africa holds significant oil and gas reserves, particularly in Nigeria, Angola, Libya, and Algeria. But the continent has historically exported raw crude while importing refined products. This trade pattern, a legacy of colonial-era economic structures and post-independence underinvestment in industrial capacity, means that even oil-rich African nations are vulnerable to disruptions in the global refining and shipping network.

When the strait closed, it did not just cut off crude supply. It disrupted the entire chain of refined product delivery that African economies depend on for diesel, gasoline, jet fuel, and cooking gas.

The Countries Feeling It First

Kenya, Ethiopia, and Zambia represent three different types of vulnerability. Kenya imports nearly all of its petroleum products, with a significant share believed to originate from or transit through the Persian Gulf. The port of Mombasa serves as an entry point for fuel destined not only for Kenya but for Uganda, Rwanda, and parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo. A disruption at the source means cascading shortages across the entire East African supply chain.

Ethiopia, landlocked and dependent on Djibouti’s port for nearly all imports, faces compounding logistics challenges. Fuel that does arrive in the region must travel by truck through corridors that are already operating near capacity. Price spikes in available supply hit Ethiopian consumers and businesses hard, in a country where per-capita income leaves little margin for energy cost increases.

Zambia, another landlocked nation, depends on fuel imports routed through Tanzania and South Africa. The global price surge triggered by the Hormuz closure raises costs even for fuel that does not originate in the Middle East, because oil is priced on global markets. When supply tightens anywhere, prices rise everywhere.

A Familiar Pattern in Global Energy Disruption

The vulnerability of energy supply chains to geopolitical chokepoints is not a new lesson. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 disrupted European energy markets and triggered a broader rethinking of energy security across the continent. Europe, however, had the financial resources and institutional capacity to rapidly diversify its supply sources, build LNG import terminals, and accelerate renewable energy deployment.

African nations facing the current oil shock do not have comparable resources. Government budgets are tighter. Access to capital markets is more constrained. The institutional infrastructure for rapid energy policy pivots is less developed. And the immediate human impact of fuel shortages is more severe in economies where a larger share of the population depends on affordable energy for basic needs like cooking, transportation to work, and agricultural production.

The parallel to the European energy crisis is instructive but not comforting. Europe invested heavily in managing its transition away from Russian energy. Africa’s options are far more limited.

What Comes Next

Short-term responses are constrained by geography and economics. Some African nations may be able to increase imports from West African producers like Nigeria and Angola, but port capacity, refinery throughput, and internal distribution networks all impose hard limits. Others may turn to alternative suppliers in the Americas or Southeast Asia, but longer shipping routes mean higher costs and longer lead times.

The medium-term question is whether this crisis will finally force the kind of investment in African energy infrastructure that decades of peacetime economics failed to produce. Building refineries, expanding storage capacity, developing domestic natural gas resources, and investing in solar and wind power are all technically feasible. They require capital and political will, both of which have been in short supply.

There is a systems engineering principle that applies here: single points of failure in any critical system are acceptable only if the probability of failure is vanishingly small. The Strait of Hormuz was a single point of failure for African energy imports. The probability of its closure was not vanishingly small. It was a known risk, discussed in strategic assessments for years. And yet the redundancy that sound engineering practice demands was never built.

The fuel shortages now spreading across East and Southern Africa are the predictable result. The question is not whether this crisis could have been anticipated. It is whether the response will finally match the scale of the vulnerability that has now been laid bare.

For millions of Africans who depend on affordable fuel to get to work, power their businesses, and cook their food, the answer cannot come soon enough.

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