does it seem feasible to you that there may be refineries in africa and elsewhere that are processing less now than two years ago because local economies can't afford the price and because the refineries aren't fitted out for exporting products?

No doubt demand is down in many 3rd world countries. While we have been experiencing record demand here in the U.S., since crude production has been flat someone must be getting by with less.

Your question made me curious about refineries in Africa, so I poked around and found this:

http://www.mbendi.co.za/indy/oilg/ogrf/af/p0005.htm

In the 50 years between 1954 and 2004 48 refineries were built in Africa. In 1954 the first African refineries were built in Algiers (CFP/Total) and Durban (Socony/Mobil). These were followed by the building of Luanda refinery (Petrofina) in 1958, and refineries in Kenya (Shell/BP), Ghana (ENI/Agip), and Senegal (consortium), in 1963. In the 1960’s refineries were also built in Cote d’Ivoire, Gabon, Tanzania, Nigeria (Port Harcourt I), and Capetown. In the 1970’s, following nationalisation of the oil industry in many countries, several state controlled refineries were built, such as Arzew in Algeria, Warri in Nigeria, CORAF in Congo, and SoNaRa in Cameroon. A final burst of refinery building took place in the 1980’s, including refineries at Warri and Port Harcourt in Nigeria. Whilst there have been a number of modernisation projects since then, the only new refineries built in the past 10 years have been Khartoum in 2001, and MIDOR in Egypt in2002.

Even whilst refineries were being built, others were already being closed. In 1966 the Zimbabwe refinery closed due to sanctions imposed during the UDI period. Between 1980 and 2003 a further 10 uneconomic refineries closed permanently.

All the refineries are basically of the topping/reforming type, except for the 4 refineries in South Africa, 2 in Egypt, 3 in Nigeria, 1 in Cote d’Ivoire, and 1 in Ghana, There are also 3 Synfuel plants (coal and gas feedstock) in South Africa. The total active distillation capacity for the continent is around 3 million b/d (15 million mt/yr), an average of 79,000 b/d per refinery.

The largest refinery in Africa is the Skikda refinery in Algeria (300mbd), the second largest the Ras Lanuf plant in Libya (220mbd). In Sub Saharan Africa the largest are the Port Harcourt refinery I and II in Nigeria (210mbd), and the Shell/BP Sapref refinery in Durban (165mbd).

Be interesting to see some production statistics from some of the African countries, but I am not sure that information is readily available. We end up with anecdotal evidence.

I think this also opens up a big can of worms as the worlds crude supply gets heavy and sour.

All the refineries are basically of the topping/reforming type

This link seems very good.

The topping reforming refinery is what we consider a simple refinery. So this means many of the third world refineries are probably only efficient with light sweet crude.

The implication is these countries will not have the capitol to convert to complex refining and thus we should see the poorest nations suffer the worst since they are competing for light sweet crude or refined gasoline with America.

I think this is the reason that refined gasoline on the global market is in short supply its now cheaper for the poorest countries to import refined products then to run their light sweet refineries. This is probably what is driving the Brent price since its Nigerian light thats the key.
This will get worse as the production of light sweet declines.

Yet one more time it looks like the pressure that peak oil puts on the oil infrastructure will ensure that we will have serious problems well before the predictions of geologic peak based on capacity. So we have indeed in essence lost a bunch of refining capacity because of the peak of light sweet even though the total oil volume has not decreased as much.
Because of above ground factors such as this the effects of peak oil are advanced by 1-3 years beyond what a simple supply analysis indicates. Of course Nigeria is now the biggest exporter for the US over KSA so it seems we have no intention of letting the poorest countries even get the light sweet they need to sustain themselves. I think my musical chairs/russian roulette model is correct. We can't even handle the peak of light sweet crude.