The imperialist war waged by the USA and Israel against the Islamic Republic of Iran, the continued genocide in Gaza and the attempt to dismember Lebanon have far-reaching consequences for Africa. The impacts go beyond handwringing concern by Western leaders, with inflated energy and fertiliser prices and limits to export volumes for Africa and beyond. These will have an impact on the agricultural calendar and cropping patterns and lead to increased food imports across Africa. The persistent mainstream rhetoric is that 20% of the world’s oil supply passes through the Straits of Hormuz. Iran’s restriction of tanker traffic and the subsequent US blockade of the narrow stretch of water with Oman have geostrategic implications: increased Russian and (ironically, for a while) Iranian oil revenue, challenges to China’s access to oil, and impeded development in the global South resulting from Brent crude oil prices rising from US$70–80 a barrel in February 2026 to US$122 a barrel in April 2026. This price increase has also had an impact on oil products, including fertiliser. African family farmers use relatively small amounts of fertiliser (compared to international averages) but the continent imports as much as 90% of its fertiliser needs, 30% through the Gulf, and where fertiliser is produced, notably in north Africa, it is largely exported. Some African oil-producing states, such as Algeria, Angola and Nigeria, may well benefit from hikes in the price of crude oil. Nigeria, for example, seems to have become a major supplier to the EU of aviation fuel processed from its Dangote refinery, described by unions as a ‘plantation of exploitation’, while its domestic consumers experience price hikes (
Boffey 2026
;
Ekanem 2026
). Yet for most of the continent another US–Israel war of choice risks increasing both the cost of a wide range of goods and their transport to Africa. New energy costs have worsened national budgets, exacerbated pressures on the funding of any government subsidies, increased inflation and raised the cost of borrowing due to hikes in global interest rates.
These impacts are serious for Africa, although felt unevenly, and represent another ratcheting down of people’s life chances and opportunities. They disguise the underlying
structural
crises that perpetuate and reproduce continental vulnerability and national and regional weakness in the world economy. They direct attention away from Africa’s heightened debt crisis – 21 out of 36 low-income countries with debt ‘distress’ are in Africa – and despite what may still be promoted by international financial institutions, the economic woes are not the product of the Covid-19 epidemic, inflation and debt servicing costs (
Sy and Laws 2026
). And they divert attention from persistent structural hunger or genocide resulting from the ways in which capitalist core countries exploit countries in the periphery. Super-exploitation in the periphery, where there continue to be lower unit labour costs, also contributes to the chauvinism of northern workers in the labour aristocracy and reluctance among the European left to understand and oppose imperialism (
Foster 2024
;
Rockhill 2025
). Africa’s continued debt and impoverishment remains a product of the ways in which the continent has been unevenly incorporated into the world economy and the class composition of African states. The continued failure to highlight the real causes of the continent’s distress is another moment in imperialist knowledge production, reportage and justification for war, on this occasion against the axis of resistance formed by Iran, Ansar Allah in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon. It also leads to an Afro-pessimism that reminds of the impossibility of radical transformation in Africa, especially in smaller states and economies.
The capitalist crisis of profitability and sustained reproduction of capital on an international scale is driving a US-led hierarchy of militarisation and an accumulation of waste (
Kadri 2023
) intent on spreading death and destruction under the guise of renewal and welfare gains for workers in the global North. Class interests around the US Republican Party and the settler Zionist entity in Palestine are recalibrating global capital accumulation and ruling class hegemony driven by Trump’s second presidency in the USA.
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This is an alliance of crypto-capital, private equity and military-tech and extractivists, including fractions of capital such as …