One year ago this week, the United States government stood in the Rose Garden and announced a new era of global trade, one that would, within months, dismantle the foundational architecture of U.S.-Africa economic relations. The consequences, now visible in export data, court rulings, and diplomatic fallout, are less a story of American aggression than of African strategic exposure. The real lesson of the past twelve months is not what Washington did. It is what Pretoria, Nairobi, Accra, and Abidjan failed to build before it happened.
A Programme Hollowed From the Inside
The African Growth and Opportunity Act lapsed on 30 September 2025, with Trump showing no inclination to renew it. The IEEPA tariffs and uncertainty about AGOA’s renewal badly dented African exports to the US, according to the Trade Law Centre, AGOA exports dropped 32% in the year ending November 2025 compared to 2024.
When Congress finally acted, the intervention was minimal. A one-year reauthorisation was extended through December 2026, retroactively reinstating benefits from September 2025. AGOA’s long-term status after 2026 remains uncertain, and AGOA-eligible imports are not exempt from the tariff actions imposing 10% to 30% duties on most African goods.
This is the critical point that African policymakers must internalise. AGOA as a legal instrument survived. AGOA as an economic tool did not. The programme’s core benefit has already been effectively eliminated. AGOA only waives the standard tariff rate the US applies to all WTO members, a rate that averaged just 3.3% in 2017, while additional US tariffs have risen far higher.
The Supreme Court Changed the Law. It Did Not Change the Risk.
On 20 February 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its 6-3 ruling in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, striking down the IEEPA tariffs as unconstitutional. The decision, authored by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., represents a significant check on executive authority and immediately calls into question the legality of tariff revenues collected over the past year, with Penn-Wharton economists estimating IEEPA-based tariff collections at approximately $175 billion to $179 billion.
Many in Africa interpreted this ruling as relief. It was not. Within hours of the decision, President Trump signed a proclamation imposing a new 10% global tariff under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, effective February 24, 2026. The US administration still has full authority to rely on Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act on national security grounds and Section 301 of the US Trade Act on unfair trade practices, both of which remain legally valid.
The architecture of U.S. tariff authority has shifted from IEEPA to other statutory tools, but the direction of travel has not changed. The Trump administration has stated explicitly that the overall direction, reshoring domestic production and expanding market access abroad through a combination of tariffs and deals, will not change. For Africa, this means that the preferential access the continent relied on for two decades is not returning. It is being replaced by a bilateral deal-making environment in which Africa’s negotiating leverage is, today, limited.
South Africa’s Disproportionate Exposure
Among all AGOA beneficiaries, South Africa carries the heaviest structural burden. South Africa still faces a disproportionate burden compared to other AGOA beneficiaries, because of the tariffs on autos at 25%, with its baseline tariff reduced from 30% to 10% for goods not already subject to section 232 tariffs or exempt from section 122 tariffs.
The political dimension compounds the economic one. How long South Africa might benefit from the AGOA revival is unclear, South Africa might be excluded, particularly after President Cyril Ramaphosa told the New York Times that Trump was ‘truly uninformed’ about South Africa and that some of his policies were ‘racist.’
This diplomatic friction, combined with automotive tariffs that directly target South Africa’s most significant manufactured export, places Pretoria in a structurally vulnerable position. Automotive exports to the U.S. represent not just revenue but industrial employment at scale. That exposure cannot be resolved through diplomatic tone management alone. It requires structural diversification, built quickly, and built deliberately.
China’s Move Changes the Calculus
While Washington’s posture toward Africa has deteriorated, Beijing has moved in the opposite direction. China’s new zero-tariff policy for 53 African countries begins 1 May 2026, covering all tariff lines. It extends previous preferences for the continent’s 33 least developed countries to a much wider group of African partners. Middle-income exporters such as Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, and Morocco stand to benefit, these countries previously faced Chinese tariffs of up to 25% on processed goods and will now gain duty-free access.
This is not a gift without conditions. China’s market access offer is structurally designed to deepen commodity dependency unless African governments use it as an entry point to negotiate value-added export categories. The difference between a copper cathode and a battery cell is the difference between extraction and industrialisation. Africa’s policymakers must treat China’s May 2026 tariff removal as a leverage point, not simply as a substitute for lost U.S. market access.
The African Continental Free Trade Area Is the Only Durable Answer
The deeper structural lesson of the past twelve months is this: Africa’s growth strategy cannot be premised on preferential access to any single foreign market. African countries must continue to accelerate their efforts to boost intra-African trade through the African Continental Free Trade Area, including by upholding their commitment to eliminate tariff and nontariff barriers, just as AGOA’s future is uncertain, so is the future of global U.S. trade relationships.
The AfCFTA now operates in a global environment that has dramatically increased its strategic logic. A continent of 1.4 billion people, with a combined GDP exceeding $3.5 trillion and significant critical mineral endowments, has every structural condition necessary to build self-sustaining trade corridors. What has been missing is political urgency. The events of the past year should provide it.
Africa does not need Washington to be hostile to build its own architecture. But Washington’s hostility has revealed how urgently that architecture is needed. South Africa, as both a G20 member and the continent’s most industrialised economy, is positioned to anchor the kind of high-value regional supply chains, in automotive components, green energy infrastructure, and agri-processing, that would make future access to any foreign market a strategic choice rather than a structural dependency.
What Comes Next
Section 122 tariff authority is time-limited to 150 days and will expire on 24 July 2026 unless extended by the U.S. Congress. The court’s ruling and the president’s immediate deployment of alternative statutory authority both demand that Congress clarify the boundaries of presidential trade power. That clarification, whenever it arrives, will define the framework within which any long-term U.S.-Africa trade agreement must be negotiated.
The U.S. Trade Representative has expressed the Trump administration’s intention to work with Congress to modernise AGOA to align with President Trump’s America First Trade Policy, with U.S. market access and African nontariff barrier reduction likely to attract particular attention. African governments that arrive at those negotiations with a coherent, unified position, anchored in AfCFTA frameworks and backed by demonstrated intra-continental trade flows, will secure better terms than those that arrive individually.
The window before July 2026 is short. It is, however, open. Africa’s strategic task is to use it.
