Africa is West’s dumping ground for toxic fuel – journalist

The global economic system blocks African nations from refining and benefiting from their own resources, David Hundeyin says

Western energy producers treat Africa as a place to offload dirty fuel they cannot sell at home, Nigerian investigative journalist David Hundeyin has told RT. 

According to Hundeyin, the long-running pattern reveals a deeper geopolitical design that prevents African nations from developing industrial independence.

“They [Western powers] see Africa as the place that can absorb the sort of toxic byproducts of the production process,” Hundeyin said. He explained that fuel refined for African markets is often processed to the cheapest possible standards, frequently containing sulfur levels “sometimes up to 200 times the limit in the EU.”

Rather than incurring the cost of refining to meet European environmental standards, producers export the substandard fuel to Africa “because it’s cheaper and easier to refine,” Hundeyin said. 

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The practice is not accidental, the journalist argues, but political. “There is a structure to the global economy,” he said, pointing to a system maintained by the US and European countries that prevents Global South nations from utilizing their own resources. “Countries in the Global South… shouldn’t be allowed to make use of their own resources or at least to beneficiate them,” Hundeyin added.

He believes reversing this trend will require “an expressly political decision to break away from the existing geopolitical alliances with Western.” 

His comments come after Aliko Dangote, president and chief executive of Dangote Industries Limited in Nigeria, stated that despite Africa’s abundant crude oil production, the continent still imports over 120 million tons of refined petroleum products annually, “effectively exporting jobs and importing poverty into our continent.” He highlighted this as a $90 billion market opportunity lost to regions with excess refining capacity. 

READ MORE: The West’s dirty secret: How most affluent nations poison the Global South

According to a 2024 investigation by the Mail & Guardian, major commodity traders Trafigura and Vitol have continued to export so-called “African-quality” fuel to Africa, with levels of sulfur, benzene, and manganese far exceeding European standards. A 2016 report by Swiss NGO Public Eye also exposed how traders like Trafigura, Vitol, and BP were flooding African markets with toxic diesel. The consequences include spikes in air pollution and respiratory illnesses.