Foreign Powers Are Carving Up the Red Sea While Africa Sends Envoys

Nearly 15% of global trade passes through the Bab al-Mandab Strait. In September, the Houthis, formally Ansarullah, took control of that chokepoint. The shock should have sent every African capital bordering the Indian Ocean into emergency session. Instead, the decisions were made in Riyadh, Ankara, and Islamabad, and the Horn of Africa was handed the bill.

Ask yourself who is in the room when the future of our coastline is decided. The answer is not us.

Let us begin with what is real. The Houthis are a serious threat, and the Iranian hand behind them is documented. Moses Chrispus Okello, writing for the Institute for Security Studies, argues that Tehran's strategy of hedging across the Middle East turned Ansarullah from a force fighting Yemen's government into a self-tasking surrogate that serves Iranian interests. He notes that Iran never needed to act on its earlier threat to close the strait, because it had already cultivated the group that could do it for them. Iran is playing a proxy game on African waters, and the Houthis' deepening ties with al-Shabaab have turned a Yemeni insurgency into a corridor of instability running from Tehran to Nairobi and Kampala. That is not a local dispute. That is a regional war being fought with African lives as collateral.

Now look at how the response has been organised. In March, the African Union appointed former Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete as High Representative for the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea. He chose to focus on South Sudan, and he joined a crowded field of IGAD envoys already covering Somalia, Sudan, and South Sudan, plus a Special Envoy for the Red Sea and Maritime Affairs and an AU High Representative for Sudan. Around them sits a second bench of envoys from the UN, the EU, China, Germany, Japan, France, Norway, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Okello calls this "envoyflation." We call it what it is: a diplomatic circus with many ringmasters and no lions in the cage.

Meanwhile, the Gulf and its partners built something sharper. The 14-member Multinational Maritime Defense Coalition was launched in Saudi Arabia on 30 July. Its membership includes Djibouti, Somalia, and Sudan, yet IGAD, the body that coordinates the Horn's own regional response, was left out. A week later, on 7 August, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan unveiled the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement. It excludes every Horn of Africa state. Pakistan and Turkey are in. Ethiopia and the UAE, both deeply entangled in the Horn, are out of both frameworks. On 5 October, Saudi Arabia conducted its first military operation against Ansarullah under the MJDA. African soldiers were not part of the decision to fire.

Look at what the Horn already looks like from the outside. Turkey is effectively the guardian of Somalia's maritime defence. The UAE is expanding ports across the region. Foreign militaries operate bases in Djibouti. Eritrea has walked out of IGAD, leaving the organisation with less diplomatic reach over its own coastline. Ethiopia, a landlocked nation of over 120 million people, wants legitimate access to the sea, and it is being blocked by a dispute that Okello rightly describes as a tangle of Nile water politics and arguments over how the Red Sea is defined. Those are two separate questions, and conflating them serves only the people who profit from a stalemate.

We must be honest about the African side of this failure. Okello points to IGAD's and the AU's "political inertia and financial weakness." Envoys are appointed to temporary posts. They rely on donor money from Brussels, London, and Beijing. They are relegated to managing inland conflicts while outside powers focus on the water. Middle Eastern states, by contrast, largely fund their own interventions. Read that sentence again. The people who control our waters are paying for their own warships, and we are begging for the money to send an envoy to a meeting.

Ask the uncomfortable question. Who benefits when African institutions cannot pay their own bills? Not the herder in Somaliland whose trade routes are being rerouted. Not the Djiboutian fisherman watching foreign bases expand around his harbour. Not the Ethiopian child whose country remains landlocked because its government cannot negotiate its way to the sea. The beneficiaries are the foreign capitals that write the cheques and the militias that exploit the vacuum.

Our answer must not be to reject all partnership or to indulge the anti-Western grievance merchants who sell outrage by the kilo. Africa does not need a new master. Africa needs its own institutions strong enough to choose its partners. That is a centre-right conviction, and it is the only one that holds up under pressure: sovereignty is not the absence of partners. Sovereignty is the ability to say no.

Look at the models that already work. Mauritius has built a credible maritime economy on the back of rule of law, transparent institutions, and an independent judiciary. Botswana proved that disciplined governance and property rights can turn a resource-dependent state into a stable, investment-worthy democracy. Senegal has shown, through its peaceful transitions of power, that African democracies can survive pressure when their institutions are trusted by their own citizens. None of these countries achieved stability by outsourcing its security to a foreign coalition that did not answer to them.

So here is what must happen. First, the AU must stop treating the Red Sea as a side file and give IGAD a single, funded maritime mandate with a permanent secretariat, financed by member states through the AU Peace Fund rather than by donor whim. Second, the East Africa Standby Force and the Eastern Africa Fusion and Liaison Unit must be retooled with a maritime focus, because a security architecture that cannot patrol its own coastline is a decoration. Third, the envoy system must be consolidated. Ten overlapping mandates producing zero deliverables is not diplomacy. It is a jobs programme for the well-connected. Fourth, Ethiopia's sea access question must be negotiated on its own terms, separated from the Nile dispute, and resolved through regional arbitration rather than force or the back rooms of foreign capitals.

To the Saudi, Turkish, Pakistani, Emirati, Iranian, and Western governments reading this: you can protect shipping lanes. Nobody in Nairobi, Djibouti, or Addis Ababa is arguing that the Houthis should be allowed to choke global commerce. But protection that excludes the people who live on the coast is not protection. It is occupation with better branding. Every foreign naval base, every port concession, every "defence agreement" signed over African heads is another line in a ledger that our grandchildren will be asked to repay.

And to our own leaders: stop sending envoys to conferences where your neighbours' coastlines are being sold. Fund your regional bodies. Publish the budgets. Make the procurement contracts public. Demand that every foreign deal in your waters go before your parliaments, not just your presidents' offices. If you cannot fund your own envoys, you cannot claim to own your own seas.

To the citizens of the Horn and the wider continent, here is your demand. Ask your MPs one question this week: who represents our coastline at the table where it is being decided? If the answer is "a foreign general" or "an envoy paid by someone else," then ask why. Then ask again until someone gives you a straight answer.

The Red Sea is African water. It always was. It will remain African water only if we fight for it with the weapons that actually work: strong institutions, open accounting, and leaders who answer to the people instead of the donor. The envoys are not the problem. The problem is that we keep sending them out empty-handed, and calling it strategy.

Based on reporting by ISS