By Victor Salami
Israel’s Foreign Trade Risks Insurance Company, namely Ashra, is the body that guarantees Israeli exports abroad. It insures banks and contractors so they face no risk if an African government defaults in interest payment on its loans. Ashra pays out the bank or firm, then chases the debtor state for payment. Thus, Israeli firms are guaranteed profits while African governments and citizens bear all the repayment risk.
The country’s model extends beyond agriculture into technology and security. Nigeria’s embrace of Israeli surveillance tools illustrates how ‘’partnerships’’ often come with hidden costs and political strings. In 2013 the government contracted Elbit Systems for a $40 million internet monitoring platform and Nigerian law enforcement agencies have since reportedly adopted Cellebrite’s phone extraction tools.
Far from constituting aid, these deals lock Nigerian institutions into costly procurement cycles denominated in foreign currency, with little transparency or accountability. Just as agricultural ‘’assistance’’ has left states paying off irrigation debts, Nigeria’s search for security has tethered it to Israeli surveillance firms – transferring scarce funds into foreign coffers while exposing citizens to over reach and abuse. So Israeli technology exports reproduce the same extractive logic as its aid projects: short-term fixes traded for long-term liabilities.
In recent years, Israel’s economic engagement in Africa has aggressively expanded into agritech, cybersecurity and critical infrastructure. By 2014, market sales of Israeli agricultural technologies (such as drip irrigation systems) to African countries had reportedly reached $100 million. These sales have continued into 2024 and 2025.
But it is the arms trade that reveals the partnerships’ most disturbing contours. Annual Israeli military exports to African nations embroiled in conflict are estimated between $200 million and $400 million, supplying unmanned aerial vehicles, artillery and surveillance technology to Cameroun, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and South Sudan.
At the end of 2023 Israel Aerospace Industries signed an approximately $1 billion deal over five years to provide Morocco with satellites, particularly the Ofek 13 spy satellites. Additional defense deals with Morocco reportedly include $540million for the Barak MX air defense system in 2022 and $48 million for Heron oness unmanned aerial vehicles delivered since 2014. And the Israeli company, Check Point Software Technologies has established a presence in Casablanca as part of a broader cyber cooperation strategy.
Ghana has engaged in cybersecurity collaboration with Israel, including government- to –government agreements on telecommunications security. This trade is notoriously opaque, yet its consequences are starkly visible. Israeli weapons have been linked to documented war crimes by UN investigators in South Sudan and are wielded by repressive regimes in Cameroun and Equatorial Guinea known for torture and extrajudicial killings. Similarly, Israeli spy ware and digital surveillance tools have been adopted by governments with weak democratic safeguards, facilitating political repression and mass surveillance.
African governments might believe they are purchasing tactical advantages; they are acquiring entanglements in human rights abuses and political instability. This military and technological cooperation, far from being a neutral exchange, exports the very tools of repression and conflict that undermine African stability and betray the continent’s professed values.
The flourishing military trade demands a sober assessment of its moral cost. By eagerly purchasing Israeli arms and spyware, African regimes with poor human rights records, from Cameroun to Chad, are investing not in security but in tools for internal repressions, directly undermining the African Union’s Agenda 2063 and UN sustainable development goals.
Worse, this relationship creates a profound moral debt trap. This increased trade does not happen in a vacuum; it is intimately tied to Israel’s ongoing genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza.
As Israel faces global condemnation for Gaza, African nations engaging in these deals become tacitly complicit, financing the very war machine destroying Palestinian lives. This is a Faustian bargain – trading sovereign principles for repression and paying in both drained treasuries and a compromised collective conscience.
While some African states deepen their military and economic ties with Israel, South Africa has leveraged the tools of international law and diplomacy to hold it accountable. Its case of genocide against Israel before the International Court of Justice underscores a fundamental foreign policy choice between pursuing short-term, often repressive, tactical gains and championing a long-term vision for a just international order based on human rights.
South Africa has weaponized the law in service of liberation, embodying the anti-colonial solidarity and commitment to human dignity that too many have abandoned. Yet South Africa is not free from Israeli pressure and influence. In August this year, Israel’s minister of digital diplomacy, David Saranga, bypassed diplomatic channels to meet the Amntshangase, amal’ondo, and aba Thembu royal families in the rural Eastern Cape. He offered support from Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation, Mashav, for local feeding schemes run by traditional authorities, flood disaster relief, and extended invitations for them to visit Israel.
And despite its International Court of Justice case, South African citizens are having to take to the streets to call on the government to match its legal interventions with economic and diplomatic ones and stop all trade, especially the sale of coal, with Israel, shut the Israeli embassy and arrest South African citizens who served in the Israel Defense Forces.
Israel’s re-entry in the African Union (AU) has not gone unchallenged. In 2021 the AU granted Israel observer status. Within two years it was suspended and Israeli diplomats expelled from AU summits in 2020 and 2025 after member states protested, citing solidarity with Palestine. South Africa has led resistance. In 2023, its parliament voted to close the Israeli embassy in Pretoria unless a Gaza ceasefire was reached. Protests outside the embassy continue, framing Israeli aid and technology as part of the same extractive system.
In 1991, Operation Solomon airlifted more than14000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 36 hours, projecting rescue and solidarity. Yet, two decades later, reports revealed Ethiopian women in Israel had been given long-acting contraceptives without informed consent. What was celebrated as salvation also carried elements of control – mirroring how ‘’humanitarian’’ aid masks asymmetrical power.
From Meir’s frank admission that Africa was about UN votes to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refrain that, ‘’Israel is coming back to Africa,’’ the strategy has been consistent Israeli ‘’aid’’ and technology exports are not free as they are structured to secure to secure guaranteed profit and political leverage. Ethiopia’s sugar projects, Zambia’s agro-centers, Angola’s Quiminha complex, Nigeria’s surveillance contracts and Watergen machines from South Africa to Sierra Leone all point to the same conclusion – development promised, dependency delivered.
Concluded. Salami an economist and researcher writes from Kano.
