These African countries can't PLAY both sides as they dont have the capacity to do so, especially in regards to intelligence capacity (spying, SIGINT etc). Name an African country that has an intelligence service even close to that of Egypt? It would have been African countires getting PLAYED instead of playing both sides. To put it into perspective, the vast majority of CAC spies in Africa were uncovered by the Chinese, literally:
The discovery of U.S. spy networks in China fueled a decadelong global war over data between Beijing and Washington.
foreignpolicy.com
Wanna know why America cant play China? This is why:
At least 18 C.I.A. sources were killed or imprisoned in China between 2010 and 2012, one of the worst intelligence breaches in decades. Investigators still disagree about how it happened.
www.nytimes.com
en.wikipedia.org
America couldn't stop China after this happened. It was a wrap after this. I suspect that this probably contributed to the intelligence community wanting Obama out of the white house.