Sub-Saharan Africa’s port connectivity has substantially benefited from risk related to Red Sea transits since Yemen’s Houthi rebels started attacking commercial shipping in November 2023 – violent maritime disruption persisting the longer the war in Gaza drags on.
East African ports like Mombasa and Dar es Salaam have seen a 10% uptick in connectivity after as much as 79% of EU-Asia vessel traffic started to avoid sailing through the Suez Canal, electing the longer but much safer voyage around the Cape of Good Hope (CoGH).
However, the spike in connectivity has been more pronounced for South Africa’s ports, where a 54.8% increase in connectivity has been recorded for east-west trade lanes.
Port Louis in the Indian Ocean shares in this spike, which includes ports like Cape Town and Durban, Container News reports.
UNCTAD reports that, since November 2023, the attacks around the Red Sea’s Bab-el-Mandeb Strait to the Gulf of Aden have driven a steady diversion of shipping traffic away from Suez.
The rerouting is significantly longer, about two weeks give or take, but the majority of shipping lines have built the longer voyages into fleet capacity, including costing related to increased fuel usage, higher insurance premiums and a scramble for capable alternative ports.
Even lines like the French carrier CMA CGM, previously risking Suez sailings under naval protection, has seemingly withdrawn from the natural east-west waterway through Egypt.
Vincent Clerc, CEO of Maersk, has been vocal about the scale of disruption. He said the impact had been “massive” since December 2023, noting that extended rotations around Africa now required additional ships and strained logistics capacity.
“All ships that can sail and all ships that were previously not well utilised in other parts of the world have been redeployed to try to plug holes,” he told attendees at an online event.
Ports in southern, eastern and some western African countries have seen a surge in activity. UNCTAD’s ‘Red Sea Crisis and Implications for Trade Facilitation in Africa’ report notes that ports around the Cape have experienced increases in vessel calls, especially for bunkering and refuelling.
John Bassadone, founder and CEO of the bunker supplier Peninsula, has said the CoGH rerouting has “increased traffic (and) has created huge congestion in bunkering ports around Africa and placed significant pressure on port infrastructure”.
Ports such as Cape Town and Durban, as well as Port Louis in Mauritius, were seeing increased demand, he said.
However, many African ports are not yet in a position to fully take advantage. Vinny Licata, head of logistics at custom manufacturer, Fictiv, observed: “Several ports were already congested due to inefficiencies. Investments are needed to enable them to compete.”
According to UNCTAD, deep-water ports such as Mombasa and Dar es Salaam, though strategically well placed, are reported to lack some of the operational sophistication and handling capacity to manage high volumes of large container vessels under the new strain.
The UN Trade and Development agency adds that the economic implications are significant, especially for those African states heavily reliant on imports and exports that transited Suez. Countries such as Djibouti, Sudan, Kenya and Tanzania have seen their trade exposed to delays and rises in shipping costs.
Agayo Ogambi, head of policy and advocacy at the Shippers Council of Eastern Africa, told The East African: “For Kenyan exports such as tea, we are taking longer to deliver, considering the routes are no longer safe. The vessels have to take a longer route or hire security for safe passage, which will delay supplies and add costs.”
Juma Ali Tellah of the Kenya Ships Agents Association, told the newspaper that East African business communities were increasingly worried about the downstream effects: container shortages, insurance costs, delays, and a rise in sea freight charges.
For South African ports the picture is much different.
Resurgent operationality by the country’s state-owned logistics utility, Transnet, has come at an important time for the country’s once-flagging ports.
Dr Jacob van Rensburg, head of Research and Development at the Southern African Association of Freight Forwarders, has stressed that changing trade lanes require optimal port connectivity.
Improvements at the country’s ports, he said, meant that the rise in service levels and cargo throughput must be sustained to benefit from CoGH rerouting.
