As the disruption of traffic in the Strait of Hormuz continues, African economies have taken a heavy hit. This is despite the fact that they possess vast energy and other resources. Four years ago, the Russia-Ukraine war had a similar impact.
As we enter what I call the post-Hormuz era – a time in which the global system is no longer defined by a single chokepoint – Africa has the unique opportunity to reverse its fortunes and emerge from the periphery of world geopolitics.
Instead of being a passive supplier of resources and a recipient of strategic decisions taken in other geographies, it can create its own geopolitical context. Here is how.
What African states fear
The first step in Africa’s transformation is a collective push to overcome what I have termed thalassophobia: a historical tendency among African states to regard the sea above all as a physical boundary rather than as a space of economic, political and military projection.
For decades, the African strategic imaginary was shaped above all by terrestrial threats — wars of national liberation, civil wars, insurgencies, coups d’etat and border conflicts. The sea remained peripheral not only in public policy but also in the strategic culture of the elites. This legacy helps to explain why Africa produced abundant reflection on land security but far less on maritime power, the blue economy, oceanic corridors and naval projection.
The other problem is that African states are often afraid of collectively assuming the political, financial and institutional costs of a common continental strategy, preferring fragmented national responses to an integrated vision of the African space.
The reasons are structural, not merely circumstantial. The first is the primacy of sovereignty. African states inherited colonial borders and made territorial inviolability the founding principle of the post-independence order — enshrined in the foundations of the Organisation of African Unity established in 1963 and its successor, the African Union.
Yet a common maritime strategy requires the sharing of sovereign prerogatives: jurisdiction over exclusive economic zones, rules of engagement, joint commands, the surrender of sensitive intelligence.
The second reason is the heterogeneity of interests. Africa has not one but several maritime frontages where threats differ: piracy and crude oil theft in the Gulf of Guinea, illegal fishing and trafficking in the Western Indian Ocean and migratory flows in the Mediterranean.
Forging a single agenda out of such divergent priorities is an arduous task, and fragmentation emerges as the path of least resistance.
The third reason is cost and capability. Building maritime capabilities — naval, coastguard, surveillance, intelligence and logistical — is extraordinarily expensive, and few states can sustain them. Because maritime security is a collective good, the classic problem of collective action sets in: each state has an incentive to wait for the others to bear the burden.
The fourth reason, and perhaps the most decisive, is the outsourcing of security. The permanent presence of foreign navies in African waters — under international missions, military bases or bilateral agreements — supplies maritime security. This functional dependence discourages the building of endogenous capacity.
The fifth reason is that elites derive greater benefit from bilateral relations with external powers than from regional integration, so that political and financial rent flows from the outside in, rather than from within.
Finally, insurrections, border disputes, internal security, etc absorb budgets and attention, relegating the sea to a priority forever postponed.
Why Africa needs geopolitical consciousness
In Africa, the sea remains politically invisible: it acquires centrality only when an international crisis reminds African states of their dependence on the global maritime corridors.
As a result, Africa’s vast strategic resources — oil, natural gas, minerals critical to the energy transition and a geographical position linking the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean — do not translate into geopolitical autonomy.
To get out of this decades-old conundrum, Africa must construct its own geopolitical context. This means defining continental priorities in the fields of maritime security, infrastructure, energy, value chains, industrial integration, foreign policy and, above all, strategic autonomy.
It is precisely here that the concept of the “post-Hormuz era” acquires density. This denotes the passage from a geopolitical system dominated by a single energy chokepoint to a polycentric system, in which the world’s economic security comes to be determined by the articulation of several strategic corridors: Hormuz itself and Bab al-Mandeb, the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, the Mozambique Channel, the Cape of Good Hope, the Western Indian Ocean and, eventually, even the Arctic — a network of interdependent corridors in which Africa occupies a central position.
In this context, Africa ceases to be merely a region traversed by global flows and comes to form part of a system of maritime corridors decisive for the world economy.
The continent does not lack maritime strategies on paper: the African Union adopted, in 2014, the 2050 Africa’s Integrated Maritime Strategy and, in 2016, the African Charter on Maritime Security and Safety. Yet the former remains largely unimplemented, and the latter still awaits the number of ratifications required for its entry into force.
What Africa needs is the geopolitical consciousness to translate these documents into practice. The distance between the strategy proclaimed and the strategy lived is, precisely, the measure of strategic thalassophobia.
What Africa needs to do
Building a geopolitical consciousness implies, first of all, changing the way African political elites perceive the sea. As long as it continues to be understood chiefly as a frontier, an export route or a space for the intervention of external powers, the political will to invest in maritime capabilities of one’s own is unlikely to emerge.
The first transformation is therefore intellectual: to recognise that the sea has ceased to be a periphery and has become one of the principal spaces for the affirmation of African power. This means inscribing maritime ambition into institutions, budgets and command structures.
As for leadership, it would be illusory to expect it exclusively from the African Union as a continental bureaucracy. The realistic impulse would come from a coalition of anchor states, endowed with maritime weight and political will — South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Morocco, Kenya, Angola and Senegal — acting through the regional economic communities and specialised mechanisms.
The precedent exists, and it is African: the Yaounde Architecture, created by the states of the Gulf of Guinea, established coordination and information-sharing centres that helped to reduce piracy in the region. It is a functional, endogenous and replicable model — one that should be extended to the Western Indian Ocean and the Mozambique Channel.
In terms of concrete policies, six lines appear to be priorities. First, to ratify and operationalise the instruments that already exist.
Second, to build shared maritime domain awareness: common surveillance, the fusion of satellite and radar intelligence, interoperable coastguards, joint patrols and agreements allowing the agents of one state to embark on the vessels of another.
Third, to resolve the question of financing, creating an African maritime security fund anchored in resources of its own and in the African Development Bank, so as to break dependence on external donors.
Fourth, to articulate the maritime effort with the African Continental Free Trade Area, treating ports and corridors as the physical backbone of integration.
Fifth, to strengthen energy resilience, developing refining capacity and strategic storage, so that producers cease to export crude and import refined products vulnerable to any disruption at chokepoints.
Sixth, to invest in the sea’s human and industrial capital: maritime academies, hydrography, ship repair and shipbuilding, African flag registries and a maritime insurance of its own, so as to capture value that today escapes the continent.
Geopolitical consciousness becomes real, in short, at the moment it translates into funded institutions, executed budgets and operational commands — not into one more document awaiting ratification or financing.
The post-Hormuz era is not a threat for Africa; it is, perhaps, its greatest window of opportunity. The decisive question is no longer whether Africa will occupy a place in the new world geopolitics; that place exists by the force of its geography and its resources. The real question is whether the continent will possess the strategic vision necessary to occupy it as the subject, and not the object, of history.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
