Shrestha Medhi | Doctoral Researcher, Africa Studies | University of Delhi
[TheEdition Indepth and Long Read Series with syndication arrangements. ]
As India and Africa move toward the forthcoming India-Africa Forum Summit, the gathering shadow of the West Asian crisis, soaring fuel prices, deepening food insecurity, and fractured global supply chains has laid bare an uncomfortable truth: Africa is not poor in resources; it is perilously dependent on systems it does not control.
Last month, on the morning of April 14, 2026, the Airline Operators of Nigeria (AON) dispatched a letter that deserves to be read by every development economist, every energy minister, and every diplomat who has ever spoken about Africa’s potential with uncritical optimism. The operators announced that Nigerian airlines would shut down all domestic operations by April 20, unless the Federal Government intervened against a jaw-dropping surge in Jet A1 aviation fuel prices, from ₦900 (Nigerian Naira) per litre in late February to over ₦3,300 per litre by mid-April, a rise exceeding 300 per cent in under eight weeks. Rano Air, an airline of the nation, had already suspended key routes. Air Peace was flying on borrowed margins. The letter was not a negotiating tactic. It was a distress signal.
The setting makes this more than an operational crisis. This is Nigeria, Africa’s largest crude oil producer, a country sitting atop an estimated 36.9 billion barrels of proven reserves, and home to the Dangote Refinery, the world’s largest single-train refinery at 650,000 barrels per day, now officially supplying over 95 per cent of the country’s aviation fuel. The painful irony is that Dangote, producing jet fuel at a relatively stable ₦1,879 per litre, was exporting over 158,000 barrels per day abroad because international markets offered better margins than the domestic one. The government eventually capped prices and extended a 30-day credit facility to avert the shutdown. The structural contradiction, however, remained untouched.
The Continent That Sells Oil and Buys Fuel and Electricity
The Nigerian aviation crisis is not an anomaly. It is a metaphor for the continent’s relationship with its own resources. Africa holds approximately 12 per cent of global proved crude oil reserves, yet imports nearly 70 per cent of its refined petroleum requirements from outside the continent. The continent extracts raw materials, ships them to Rotterdam or Houston for processing, and then buys them back at a markup that erodes every naira, rand, and shilling it earned at the wellhead. According to the African Refiners and Distributors Association, bridging this gap would require more than $100 billion in new refinery investment, yet the investment has not arrived at the scale required.
The immediate trigger for the 2026 crisis was geopolitical. The escalation of US-Iran hostilities in early 2026 disrupted global oil supply routes, drove Brent crude briefly past $104 per barrel, and cut off several African nations from their customary import supply chains. East African nations scrambling for alternative tankers, Zimbabwean authorities raising ethanol blending ratios, Kenyan petrol stations managing panicked queues; these were all expressions of the same structural vulnerability. But attributing the African fuel crisis to the Iran war would be like attributing a flooded basement to the rain. The drainage system was broken long before the rain arrived.
South Africa tells a different chapter of the same story. By 2025, disciplined maintenance, emergency capacity additions, and partial liberalisation of the electricity sector had produced a fragile but real reprieve, with Eskom recording 231 consecutive blackout-free days. The achievement was celebrated as a marker of institutional recovery. Yet the recovery sits on fundamentally unreformed ground. Coal accounts for roughly 80 per cent of South Africa’s electricity generation, and the country, having closed several major refineries since 2020, imports the overwhelming majority of its refined petroleum. These are not legacy liabilities being addressed; they are structural choices being deferred. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)’s 2025 economic survey of South Africa identified the electricity sector’s insufficient investment in renewables and continued regulatory uncertainty as the primary constraints on growth. When the Hormuz disruptions rippled outward, South Africa’s fuel import prices were projected to rise by 12 to 24 US cents per litre, straining consumers already managing a fragile post-load-shedding economic recovery. There is a temptation, in policy circles, to treat South Africa’s energy situation as a turnaround story. It should instead be read as a warning: institutional improvement that is not underpinned by supply chain transformation remains permanently exposed to the next external shock.
A Crisis Made Worse by Deliberate Under-Investment
Several African governments have, for decades, chosen to subsidise fuel consumption rather than invest in refining capacity. It is politically popular to keep pump prices artificially low in the short run. It is fiscally catastrophic in the long run, particularly because the same governments that spend scarce foreign exchange importing refined products lack the balance sheets to build the refineries that would end the cycle. Ghana accumulated $3 billion in energy sector arrears by 2024, including $379 million owed to a single Turkish floating power generation company, and required a $1.47 billion emergency restructuring in 2025 just to stabilise its power finances. This is not a misfortune. This is the accumulated cost of decades of policy choices that treated energy as a welfare instrument rather than a productive infrastructure.
The African Petroleum Producers Organisation has outlined a rational path out of five integrated regional refining hubs in Nigeria, Angola, South Africa, Tanzania, and Algeria, targeting 3 million barrels per day in production capacity by 2035, aligned with the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) to enable intra-African fuel distribution. The African Energy Bank, due to launch with $5 billion in initial capital specifically targeting downstream and gas infrastructure, represents the financial architecture for this ambition. These are credible frameworks. What they require is credible partnerships, and that is precisely where the upcoming India-Africa Forum Summit (IAFS-4) assumes urgent relevance.
IAFS-4: Partnership at a Moment of Continental Vulnerability
The upcoming fourth India-Africa Forum Summit, under the theme India-Africa Strategic Partnership for Innovation, Resilience, and Inclusive Transformation. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, at the logo and website launch on April 23, articulated a vision rooted in “equality, mutual respect and shared progress,” and drew explicit complementarity between India’s Viksit Bharat 2047 vision and Africa’s Agenda 2063. The language of partnership is familiar. What would distinguish IAFS-4 from its predecessors is the specificity of the commitments that flow from it, and energy infrastructure must be at the centre.
India’s interest in this partnership is not humanitarian. It is strategic, which is precisely why it is sustainable. India’s oil imports from African nations doubled to approximately 330,000 barrels per day in February 2025 alone, as New Delhi diversified its crude supply away from Russia and the Gulf. Indian Oil Corporation took delivery of two million barrels of Nigeria’s Okwuibome crude that month. ONGC Videsh holds a 16 per cent participating interest in Mozambique’s Rovuma Area-1, targeting 75 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas. BPCL has committed approximately $32.9 billion to Mozambican exploration blocks. India needs Africa’s hydrocarbons. Africa needs India’s refining technology, engineering capacity, and institutional experience. This is the raw material of a genuine partnership, shared self-interest, not asymmetric charity. Engineers India Limited’s contract, worth over $350 million, to oversee the expansion of the Dangote Refinery from 650,000 to 1.4 million barrels per day, is the model that IAFS-4 should scale. An Indian state enterprise, building African refining capacity, creating African jobs, and securing Indian supply chains simultaneously. This is what value-chain integration looks like in practice, and it is categorically different from the extractive model that both India and Africa have, in their respective histories, experienced from the outside.
Securing the Energy Corridor: Defence, Sea Lanes, and Strategic Ports
Energy security, as any serious strategist will insist, cannot be disaggregated from physical security. The supply chains that move African crude to Indian refineries and Indian refined products back to African markets cross waters that are not uniformly safe, stable, or uncontested. Piracy in the Gulf of Guinea remains a persistent operational risk. The Red Sea-Hormuz corridor demonstrated in 2026 how quickly geopolitical disruption can translate into supply chaos for import-dependent economies. Great-power competition for port access in the Indian Ocean Region is intensifying, with China’s Belt and Road Initiative having placed it inside 12 African ports.
India’s response has been deliberate and accelerating. In April 2025, the Indian Navy launched Africa-India Key Maritime Engagement (AIKEYME), the first large-scale multilateral naval exercise with 10 African nations, co-hosted with Tanzania’s People’s Defence Force. The six-day exercise brought together India, Tanzania, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles, and South Africa, conducting anti-piracy drills, Visit-Board-Search-and-Seizure (VBSS) operations, maritime search and rescue, and real-time intelligence sharing. The ambition is for AIKEYME to become a biennial exercise, eventually incorporating West African nations, precisely the region where Nigeria’s and Angola’s energy infrastructure is concentrated. The IOS Sagar initiative, under which INS Sunayna deployed with a composite crew from nine partner nations to conduct joint surveillance of exclusive economic zones in the southwestern Indian Ocean Region, represents the doctrine being made operational. On land, India’s defence footprint in Africa is shifting from symbolic to substantive. TATA Advanced Systems Limited’s Wheeled Armoured Platform manufacturing facility in Berrechid, Morocco, marks a structural departure from arms sales to defence industrialisation in Africa. Nigeria, which signed a $1 billion economic and defence agreement with India in 2023, advanced cooperation across counter-terrorism training, maritime operations, and anti-piracy frameworks through bilateral engagements in 2025. Algeria’s defence-industrial cooperation talks with India’s Chief of Army Staff, and the AFINDEX 2023 exercise involving 23 African nations, collectively sketch the outline of a continental-scale security architecture. The critical strategic step is to explicitly link this security architecture to energy infrastructure protection. AIKEYME’s future editions should incorporate the protection of offshore energy installations, pipeline corridor monitoring, and strategic port security as core exercise objectives, alongside the cyber defence capacity building that India, by India’s own military assessment, has “very strong foundations” to offer. The Indian Ocean Region’s energy corridors must be treated as critical infrastructure, not merely trade routes, and India’s SAGAR (Security and Growth for All in the Region) doctrine provides exactly the conceptual framework to formalise this.
A 21st-century energy security architecture is not only physical. It is informational. African governments routinely lack the real-time surveillance capacity to monitor offshore oil installations, pipeline networks, and coastal shipping lanes. This is not a technology problem for which Africa needs to wait. It is a partnership problem that India is positioned to solve immediately. India’s engagement with Africa in the space domain has a meaningful track record, including the Pan-African e-Network, satellite launches for African nations, and joint research frameworks, but it has not yet been systematically connected to energy security applications. The India-Africa Partnership in the Space Sector, outlined by the Space Industry Association of India, identifies Earth Observation satellites, ground stations, and monitoring cooperation as pillars of a broader engagement. Deploying Indian remote sensing and communication satellite capacity for joint surveillance of African offshore energy fields, shipping corridors, and pipeline networks is technically feasible today. IAFS-4 is the appropriate platform to formalise a Joint Satellite Surveillance Compact that operationalises this capacity.
India’s AI diplomacy provides a second layer. The pre-engagement session hosted in Johannesburg ahead of the India AI Impact Summit 2026 focused on Global South collaboration, responsible AI governance, and equitable technology access. A structured AI-for-energy application framework, predictive analytics for grid demand management, satellite-linked pipeline monitoring, and AI-assisted refinery optimisation, is not aspirational technology. It is deployable now, with the Indian IT sector capacity and African energy infrastructure as the platform. India’s Digital Public Infrastructure stack, which linked over a billion Indians to financial services and governance through low-cost, scalable digital architecture, offers a directly transferable model for Africa’s electricity distribution and fuel supply management challenges.
Critical Minerals and the Value-Chain Imperative
The energy conversation cannot be separated from the minerals conversation. Africa holds the world’s largest reserves of cobalt, manganese, platinum group elements, and significant deposits of lithium and rare earths, the materials that define the clean energy transition, the electric vehicle revolution, and the next generation of defence systems. India’s National Critical Minerals Mission (NCMM), launched in January 2025, projects that 5 per cent of India’s annual critical mineral demand will be met from 50 overseas mining assets by 2031, with Africa as the primary geography.
The question is not whether India will engage Africa’s mineral wealth. It is how. India’s approach, shaped by Prime Minister Modi’s visits to Ghana and Namibia, has signalled an intent to invest in processing infrastructure inside African refineries, battery precursor plants, and training programmes rather than replicating the colonial pattern of raw material extraction followed by value-addition elsewhere. This matters enormously for the energy argument: an Africa that processes its own cobalt into battery materials, its own crude into aviation fuel, and its own natural gas into LNG, is an Africa that is no longer captive to the supply disruptions that grounded Nigerian aircraft in April 2026. The Africa India Critical Minerals Dialogue, now formalised, and the Mineral Security Partnership conversations that India has been pursuing give IAFS-4 a ready framework to convert this intent into institutional architecture.
What IAFS-4 Must Deliver
The measure of IAFS-4 will not be the number of MoUs signed. It will be whether, within a measurable timeframe, African aviation fuel is priced by domestic supply chains rather than Iranian geopolitics. Whether South African electricity is generated from a diversified grid rather than a crumbling coal fleet. Whether an Angolan offshore platform is monitored by an Indian satellite, a Mozambican port is secured by a jointly-trained navy, and a Kenyan grid is managed by AI systems built with Indian technical assistance. The following commitments are within immediate reach and deserve to be formalised at the summit. A Joint Energy Resilience Fund, co-capitalised by Indian public sector undertakings ONGC, BPCL, IOC, and the newly established African Energy Bank, to provide patient capital for the five regional refining hubs that the African Petroleum Producers Organisation has already designed. An India-Africa Satellite Surveillance Compact, formalising the deployment of Indian Earth Observation assets for energy infrastructure monitoring and maritime domain awareness across the Western Indian Ocean. A Critical Minerals Processing Partnership, following the EIL-Dangote model, ensures Indian investment flows to in-country beneficiation rather than raw extraction, creating African industrial capacity rather than African raw material dependency. And the expansion of AIKEYME to West African waters, with energy infrastructure protection and port security as explicit exercise mandates alongside the existing anti-piracy and maritime safety frameworks.
India holds a credibility advantage in Africa that no other major power currently matches: it is perceived, largely accurately, as a partner that does not condition its engagement on governance benchmarks, does not seek military basing rights as a precondition for investment, and has itself recently emerged from the same developmental constraints that many African economies are navigating. That credibility is an asset that depreciates through inaction. Every oil tanker rerouted by a Hormuz crisis that African nations could not hedge against, every Nigerian aircraft grounded by fuel it could not afford, and every South African household that suffered an unnecessary blackout represent a failure of partnership that India had the capacity, if not always the urgency, to help prevent. The opportunity at IAFS-4 is not to manage Africa’s energy crisis. It is to make the next one structurally impossible.
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