Thirty days after conflict erupted around the Strait of Hormuz on 28 February 2026, nine African countries were already reporting average gasoline price increases of 10.9 percent. Africa did not start this war. But the continent is absorbing its consequences faster, and more painfully, than almost anywhere else on earth.
The math is unforgiving. Eighty percent of African countries are net oil importers, which means an energy price shock is never just an energy story. Transport costs make up 30 to 50 percent of final prices in domestic food markets across the continent, so what happens at the pump shows up on the dinner table within weeks. For households already stretched thin, that transmission is brutal.
The fertiliser picture is just as alarming. Five of the ten largest African importers of Persian Gulf fertilisers are Sudan, Tanzania, Somalia, Kenya, and Mozambique. Urea prices climbed 35 percent in under a month after the conflict began, at exactly the moment farmers needed supplies most. A bad planting season has consequences that stretch years, not weeks.
None of this is new. Covid-19, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, US tariff shifts and aid cuts have all told the same story: decisions made far outside Africa carry a disproportionate cost for its 1.4 billion people. The Hormuz shock is simply the latest proof of a structural dependency that African leaders and development partners have acknowledged for decades without resolving.
The question now is whether this latest crisis finally moves the conversation from acknowledgement to action, because the next disruption is already on its way.
Originally published by African Business.