The Sulphur Acid… Acid Test
Africa’s supply chain crisis is not about oil. It is about what sits beneath it.
By Ceaser Siwale
Everyone is watching Crude. The downstream has already moved past it.
Sulphuric acid is not a commodity most people track. It should be. It underpins phosphate fertiliser, copper cathode production, cobalt processing, and a chain of industrial inputs that Africa depends on but does not produce. Three of its global supply sources have now failed in the same window. The Strait of Hormuz, through which 44% of seaborne sulphur passes, is disrupted. China is cutting acid exports from May. Ukrainian strikes have degraded Russian refining infrastructure. Any one of these alone puts pressure on margins. Together, they break the input chain.
The consequences land unevenly, but they land everywhere that matters.
Start with fertiliser. Morocco’s OCP is the world’s largest phosphate producer. It runs on Gulf sulphur and Chinese acid. Both are now impaired. That is not a price problem. It is a production problem. Kenya, which imports virtually all its fertiliser, subsidises it in shillings against dollar-priced inputs. When the commodity price rises and the currency weakens simultaneously, the fiscal cost increases on both sides. No subsidy framework was built for that.
Move to copper. The DRC’s oxide operations, between 45 and 60% of national output, use acid-leach processing that consumes sulphuric acid at scale. Mines around Lubumbashi are paying $800 per tonne for it, cash. Sulphide smelters produce acid as a by-product. They benefit when prices rise. The SX-EW plants that consume it do not. If supply stays tight, those are the operations that cut first.
Zambia’s problem is different but connected. The country is sitting on a record maize surplus. The kwacha’s 33% appreciation, celebrated across every headline, has priced that grain 43% above regional competition. The Food Reserve Agency floor has never been reduced. The maize exists. It cannot move. New season grain is already trading at levels converging with South Africa’s landed price. A surplus that cannot clear is not food security. It is a fiscal trap.
Nigeria holds the mirror. Dangote has refining capacity. PAPSS has a settlement infrastructure. Neither is operationally connected to the other. While these African-built rails sit idle, China assembled a yuan-denominated energy corridor in 6weeks. That is not a policy gap. It is an institutional failure in real time.
Here is the part that should keep policymakers awake. Africa has leverage it has barely used. The Bushveld Complex holds 79% of global platinum group metal reserves. The DRC produces over 70% of global cobalt. The industrialised economies that need these minerals for supply chains they cannot source elsewhere, what I call absorber economies, need what Africa has. That is real bargaining power. But it is depreciating. LFP batteries already command forty per cent market share without any cobalt. CATL’s sodium-ion eliminates lithium, cobalt, nickel, and manganese. The window is five to seven years. After that, substitution makes the leverage academic.
The response cannot be a continental summit. It requires a Coalition of the Eligible, the subset of African nations with mineral concentration, energy readiness, or logistical positioning to act now, on standardised terms. Not fifty-four countries. The ones that can move. Others join as conditions change. The coalition negotiates processing investment on African soil, structured through self-liquidating arrangements: time-bound equity with escrowed revenues that fund progressive buyouts and vocational transfer. The absorber economy does not need to own the refinery. It needs a guaranteed offtake. The offtake agreement is the real asset.
Processing requires firm power. Coal, gas, hydro, nuclear. Not a variable generation that cannot anchor an industrial baseload. China invested $625 billion in clean energy last year. Eighty-six per cent of its primary energy is still fossil. Build the capability first. Optimise the energy mix second.
Where domestic capacity already exists, fertiliser, steel, and cement now protect it. Where capacity is being built, announce tariff schedules at contract signing so protection tracks construction. Delay is a subsidy to the competition. African pension funds hold over six hundred billion dollars, mostly locked in domestic government paper because cross-border deployment counts as foreign exposure. Audited returns from processing facilities and a credible, African-built risk engine can unlock reclassification. That is continental capital at a scale no donor framework will ever match.
Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1791 that:
a nation which cannot produce essential goods is not fully sovereign.
That argument has not aged. It has become operational. Self-production of urea, ammonia, fertiliser, and sulphuric acid. Self-sufficiency in food, water, and energy. Local capital financing capacity from ownership. The sequencing is what has been missing. This crisis is clarifying it.
