Global Fire Power (GFP) recently published its 2019 index of powerful militaries in Africa. This year, 34 African countries were assessed to determine powerful militaries.

As was the case in 2018, Egypt has the most powerful military in the continent and the twelfth globally (out of 137 countries) with a score of 0.2283. With more than 211 jet fighters, Egypt is the ninth world’s air power.

It is followed by Algeria that went from the 23^rd  to the 27^th in the world but is still the second most powerful military in Africa with a score of  0.4551.

South Africa (0.5405 points), Nigeria (0.7007 points) and Ethiopia (0.7361 points) are respectively ranked 3^rd (32^nd globally), 4^th (44^th globally) and 5^th (47^th globally) in Africa.

The African top5 is immediately followed by Angola (6^th in Africa and 58^th in the world) that lost its 2018 place to Ethiopia but is ahead of Morocco with a score of 0.8154.

Morocco has the 7^th military power in Africa (61^st in the world) with a score of 0.8244. It is followed by Sudan (with a score of 1.0051), the DRC (a score of 1.0631) and Libya (a score of 1.2349).

Let’s note that the global firepower ranking is based on five criteria namely, the number of serving military members, the naval force, fuel availability for military operations, the number of jet fighters, the defence budget and logistics flexibility.

According to this "power index", the perfect score should be 0.0000 which is, in fact, impossible to attain. The farther a country is from this score, the lower it is in the index. The index does not take nuclear power into account and does not penalize landlocked countries that have no naval powers.

Let’s note that many countries made significant progress. For instance, Côte d’Ivoire, the 21^st military power in Africa jumped to the 104^th place in the world (119^th in 2018) while Mali (18^th in Africa) slashed the 99^th place. The world top5 are the USA, Russia, China, India and France.

Moutiou Adjibi Nourou

2019 African power index according to the Global Fire Power