The Supply Shock Hiding in Sulphuric Acid

Dean Onyambu, who writes the African macro letter Canary Compass, traces a shock most market commentary has missed: three of the world's largest sources of sulphuric acid impaired at once — a Gulf route that carries a large share of the world's seaborne sulphur, China's halt on acid exports, and reduced Russian output. The chemical is unglamorous but load-bearing, sitting behind phosphate fertiliser and behind the hydrometallurgical processing that turns ore into copper.

From there he maps five distinct African exposures — fertiliser cost and planting-season risk in Zambia and Kenya, copper-leaching dependence in the DRC, phosphate in Morocco, refining in Nigeria — and notes that the continent already has cross-border settlement rails it has barely used for commodity trade. His conclusion is structural: corridor disruptions like this are a recurring feature of great-power competition rather than a one-off, and capital should treat physical systems — land, water, strategic minerals — accordingly.

The core idea A single industrial chemical most investors never think about turns out to sit upstream of both food and copper. When three of its supply sources fail together, the shock doesn't stay in one market — it runs from fertiliser bags in East Africa to leaching pads in the DRC. Onyambu's point is that this is the normal shape of a fragmenting world, not an accident.

Where it fits

This is the kind of regional, primary-source colour we can't produce in-house, and it pairs with how we read commodity-driven inflation and supply-chain bottlenecks. We feature it because it's original and carefully built, not as a positioning call — a market-diary read from a corner of the map most desks skip. (The note is dated mid-April; its supply thesis is structural rather than news-pegged.)