Warlords and Their Foreign Backers Are Starving 134 Million Africans

Think about what it means to wake up hungry for the third year running. Not once, not during a bad harvest, but every single day, across three consecutive years. That is the reality for nearly 164 million Africans right now. They are not facing a mysterious act of nature. They are facing the consequences of decisions made by men with guns, and by the governments and foreign powers that arm, fund, and shield them.

Here is the number that should keep every African leader awake tonight. Roughly 134 million of those people, about 80 percent, live in countries experiencing conflict. The hunger is not spread randomly across the continent. It is concentrated exactly where the bullets are flying, where the roads have been cut, where the fields have been burned, and where the markets have been looted. When we say conflict drives hunger, we are describing a deliberate strategy, not a tragic coincidence.

Consider the scale of the collapse. In 2019, around 61 million Africans were classified as facing crisis-level food insecurity or worse. Today that figure has nearly tripled. Nobody can credibly claim that a continent has tripled its hunger through drought alone in just a few years. Something human did this. Someone chose it.

The evidence is written in the places where the hunger is worst. Famine conditions persist in parts of Sudan, South Sudan, and Somalia, and they persist most severely in the areas that are hardest to reach because of fighting. In Sudan, the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces has turned farmland into a graveyard and granaries into targets. Aid convoys are blocked, markets are emptied, and families are forced to eat leaves and animal feed while their children's bellies swell. In South Sudan and Somalia, the pattern is the same: armed factions fight over territory and resources, and ordinary people pay the bill in starvation.

Then there is Borno State in northeastern Nigeria, the heartland of the Boko Haram and ISWAP insurgency. An estimated 10,300 people there are expected to face famine conditions. Ten thousand three hundred human beings, many of them displaced children and widows, are staring at the kind of hunger that the world was supposed to have eliminated after the twentieth century. Nigeria is Africa's largest economy and its most populous nation, and yet its own citizens in the northeast are being pushed toward famine by an insurgency that has been fighting for more than a decade. Ask yourself: how long can a government claim to protect its people while its people are dying of hunger in plain sight?

We must also speak plainly about eastern Congo, where the Rwandan Defence Force has deployed full combat units inside a sovereign neighbour and uses M23 as its proxy shield. This is not a rebellion. It is an invasion, a war of aggression that the UN Group of Experts has documented in detail across successive reports. When an army occupies farmland, drives farmers from their villages, and turns markets into checkpoints, it does not merely kill people with bullets. It starves them. Displacement is hunger on a timetable. Every fleeing family that cannot return to its fields is another entry in the famine statistics, and every occupier who denies this is lying with a straight face.

Under international law, this is not a grey area. Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The UN Security Council recognised this in Resolution 2417 in 2018, which condemned the use of hunger as a weapon and demanded that parties to conflict protect civilians and humanitarian access. The language exists. The legal framework exists. What is missing is the will to enforce it, and that absence is a choice made in Addis Ababa, New York, Paris, Moscow, Beijing, and Abu Dhabi, as well as in the capitals where the fighting actually happens.

Because the continent's new scramble is not only about minerals. It is about who controls the land, the ports, the security contracts, and the grain. Wagner-linked operations have been reported across Sudan's gold sector, where profits flow out while local communities go hungry. Foreign arms sales keep the fighting going, and foreign-funded militias keep the roads closed. Some of the very powers that lecture Africa about democracy are the ones selling the weapons that empty our fields. We have seen this movie before. The actors have changed. The extraction has not.

So what should be done? Start with the basics that African success stories already prove. Botswana built one of the most stable economies on the continent by guarding property rights, managing its diamond wealth through transparent institutions, and insisting on the rule of law. Mauritius turned a sugar island into an open, service-led economy by maintaining independent courts and predictable regulation. Senegal demonstrated that peaceful transfers of power strengthen farmers and investors alike, because people will invest in land and seed only when they trust that the next government will not seize them. Rwanda's economic reforms are real, but its military adventures in Congo are a stain that cannot be washed out by tourism brochures. Good governance cannot be selective.

The African Union must stop treating the Peace and Security Council as a diplomatic museum. It should demand unfettered humanitarian access in Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, and eastern Congo, with independent monitors and public reporting on every blocked convoy. Regional economic communities should commit to a binding protocol that treats deliberate starvation of civilians as a red line, with sanctions on commanders and sponsors who violate it. Governments should open their food supply chains to private investors who will build storage, transport, and irrigation, while guaranteeing land titles so that farmers can borrow against their own fields. Anti-corruption agencies must publish how food aid money is spent, because every diverted sack of grain is a theft from a child.

And the Security Council, which has the power to refer war crimes to the ICC and impose targeted sanctions, must stop hiding behind procedural paralysis. Three consecutive years above 160 million hungry Africans is not a crisis awaiting a response. It is a verdict on the response that has already been given, and it is a failing grade.

Now the question that matters most. What are you going to do with your anger?

We are told that hunger is too big, too complicated, too far away. We are told the continent is too diverse for common demands. Reject both lies. Every African citizen can demand that their own government publish the food security data, fund the local clinics, and refuse to sign arms deals with militias that starve civilians. Every journalist can refuse to repeat the word "rebels" when the evidence points to invaders. Every diaspora community can pressure the foreign governments that hold their own values in one hand and their weapons contracts in the other. Every youth group can organise, petition, and vote for leaders who put farmers before warlords.

We are the ones who must end this. Not donors, not foreign ministers, not the next summit communiqué. Us. The 164 million who are hungry today are our mothers, our brothers, our neighbours, and our future. Their hunger is not inevitable. It is a crime with names, addresses, and supply lines. Name it, document it, and refuse to look away until the convoys roll and the guns fall silent.

Based on reporting by ACSS-EMAIL