Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: Algeria balances its ties to Iran with its role as a critical gas supplier to the West, Egypt imposes a monthlong energy-rationing policy, and France reportedly disinvites South Africa from the G-7 leaders’ summit under pressure from the United States.
The war in Iran has put Algeria in an awkward position, as it balances its strategic alignment with Iran while also benefiting from soaring energy prices as a critical gas supplier to the West.
At the outbreak of the war, when U.S. and Israeli strikes assassinated Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Algeria had a relatively muted response. Although Algiers expressed “support for its Arab brothers in the face of the unacceptable violations they have suffered,” it did not condemn the United States.
Algeria’s restraint on the Iranian crisis “undoubtedly reflects Algiers’ desire to avoid any alignment in a conflict with multiple ramifications,” wrote the editorial board of the newspaper Le Matin d’Algérie on March 5.
Algeria and Iran have had close ties for decades, rooted in a shared “resistance” ideology against Israel and a mutual desire to expand their influence in West Africa.
Iran also supports Sahrawi independence—an important issue for Algeria, which hosts the Polisario Front, the Sahrawi liberation movement fighting Morocco’s sovereignty claim over Western Sahara. Morocco severed diplomatic relations with Iran in 2018, accusing Tehran’s proxy Hezbollah of supplying arms to the Polisario Front, though some analysts dispute this claim.
Despite this, Algeria seems to be increasingly hedging its bets amid changing geopolitical winds, looking to benefit from the energy disruptions sparked by the conflict in Iran.
“We have our own strategy: diversify our partners, be less dependent on Western supply chains, and avoid any conflict during the remaining three years of [U.S. President Donald] Trump’s term,” one anonymous Algerian diplomat recently told the Middle East Eye.
Algeria holds the continent’s second-largest proven natural gas reserves after Nigeria and is the biggest gas producer in Africa. Since the 1960s, it has exported gas to Europe.
Last week, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares metseparately with Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune in Algiers, seeking to increase gas imports as conflict in the Middle East threatens their energy supplies. In turn, Algeria is looking to renegotiate prices, eyeing a 15 to 20 percent increase in gas export prices.
Algeria already supplies around 30 percent of Italy’s annual gas consumption and Spain’s gas imports. Italy is turning to Algeria in the hopes of offsetting the loss of gas that it usually sources from Qatar, which is unable to fulfill its contract following an Iranian strike on its liquefied natural gas plants.
Spain and Italy receive Algerian gas from two separate pipelines. Algeria exports gas to Spain directly through the Medgaz undersea pipeline, while Italy gets its supplies via the TransMed pipeline, which crosses through Tunisia and the Mediterranean Sea.
Analysts have long sounded a note of caution on Algeria’s ability to increase capacity via the TransMed pipeline, since volumes have dropped in recent years due to aging infrastructure. (Construction on the pipeline began in the late 1970s.) Compounding this, gas consumption in Algeria has grown rapidly over the past two decades, reducing the amount available for export.
Yet if Algeria manages to either secure higher export prices or increase capacity, it would have a significant economic advantage over its rival, Morocco—particularly as the two neighbors vie for influence in the Sahel and the wider West Africa region directly to their south.
The Sahel and West Africa have become an increasingly important battleground for the rivals, especially as Algeria has found itself increasingly isolated after the first Trump administration recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara in 2020, prompting many European and African nations to do the same as they sought trade deals with Rabat.
So far, Rabat has tried to woo West African nations with trade deals and the Sahel’s junta-led nations with access to the ocean via a $1.2 billion port under construction in Western Sahara. It has also had high hopes for the Nigeria-Morocco Gas Pipeline, but the project—which would take 25 years to complete—has been impeded by security challenges in Nigeria.
As Morocco is grappling with fuel price hikes and inflation from the war, Algiers quietly signed a deal over the weekend with Ivory Coast to cooperate on gas and oil projects. This came shortly after Algeria announced that its state-owned energy firm, Sonatrach, would begin oil and gas drilling operations this month in Niger, and that it had committed to an $88 million program to modernize Burkina Faso’s mining and energy infrastructure.
Now that Algeria is losing Iran’s security networks as Tehran focuses on its own survival, it is more exposed to the rapidly escalating violence in the Sahel, and some analysts see the renewed warming of relations as a positive step in building cohesive security responses in the region.
Thursday, April 2: Egypt’s central bank makes an interest rate decision as prices spike in the country for petrol, diesel, and cooking gas amid the war in Iran.
Sunday, April 5: Eight OPEC+ countries including Algeria hold a virtual meeting.
Cairo goes dark. Fewer lights were visible across Cairo over the weekend as Egypt, Africa’s largest gas consumer, faces a severe energy crisis driven by conflict in the Middle East that has disrupted global oil supplies.
A monthlong energy-rationing policy took effect on March 28, which includes dimming streetlights and roadside advertising boards. Shops, malls, restaurants, and cafes are required to shut by 9 p.m., extended to 10 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays.
Cairo is known for its vibrant nightlife, with shops normally closing at midnight and restaurants and markets staying open until the early hours of the morning. One cafe owner described the measures as “ruinous” to The Associated Press.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi warned on Monday that oil could climb to $200 per barrel if the Iran conflict does not end. Cairo intends to extend the measures if war is prolonged.
Horn of Africa envoy. Former Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete has been appointed the African Union’s high representative for the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea amid escalating tensions in the region. Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, the chairperson of the African Union Commission and former foreign minister of Djibouti, said he was confident Kikwete would make a “significant contribution” to advancing peace.
Tensions between Ethiopia and Eritrea have risen sharply in recent months, with both sides mobilizing troops along their shared border near Ethiopia’s Tigray region, where a civil war took place from 2020 to 2022. Ethiopia accuses Eritrea of backing a hard-line faction of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the region’s dominant party, in order to destabilize the country.
Pretoria’s missing invite. South Africa recently said that France disinvited it from the G-7 leaders’ summit in Evian in June under pressure from the Trump administration amid worsening U.S.-South Africa relations.
French President Emmanuel Macron had personally invited South African President Cyril Ramaphosa as an observer country during last year’s G-20 summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, but France backtracked after the United States threatened to boycott the gathering, the Financial Times reports. France has chosen to invite Kenya to represent Africa at the summit instead.
U.S.-South Africa tensions have largely centered on Trump’s repeated claims that South Africa, the continent’s most industrialized nation, is committing a white genocide—allegations that have been widely discredited.
Ramaphosa has downplayed the snub, saying that there was no pressure and that Pretoria’s absence is “not a surprise” since it is not a member of the G-7.
U.N. slavery vote. Last week, Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama accused the Trump administration of “normalizing the erasure” of Black history, citing its bans on exhibits and books related to slavery, segregation, and racism.
Mahama was speaking ahead of a United Nations General Assembly vote to formally recognize the trans-Atlantic slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity.” The resolution, which was proposed by Ghana and supported by the African Union, was adopted with 123 votes in favor and three against: the United States, Israel, and Argentina. Fifty-two nations, including former colonial powers such as the United Kingdom and European Union member states, abstained.
The trans-Atlantic slave trade saw around 12 million to 15 million Africans captured over a span of 400 years and enslaved in the Americas. More than 2 million people are estimated to have died on the journey. The lifespan of an enslaved African on sugar plantations in the Americas could be as brief as seven years.
- The United States Has Become a Rogue Stateby Stephen M. Walt
- Three Scenarios for a Post-Trump Worldby Hal Brands
- Trump Is Losing the War in Iranby Ravi Agrawal
Nigeria’s Arctic archives. In February, Nigeria became the first African country to store records in the Arctic World Archive, an underground storage facility in Svalbard, a remote Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. The records, which are kept on specialized film that lasts up to 2,000 years, seek to preserve Nigeria’s history, Gabriella Opara reports for the Guardian.
It is the start of “a long journey towards narrative restitution and making sure that in all the spaces where we should be, we are presenting,” said Obi Asika, the director-general of Nigeria’s National Council for Arts and Culture.
Russia’s manosphere. In the BBC, Mungai Ngige reports on African women facing online abuse after appearing on viral videos posted on social media without their consent. A Russian man had secretly filmed them while approaching them in broad daylight on the streets of Ghana and Kenya.
“Russian media reported that the videos were posted by social media channels using a handle combining the words for male genitals and glory in Russian,” Ngige writes. The videos have led to outrage among politicians in Kenya and Ghana.
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