{"id":378702,"date":"2025-05-18T10:12:29","date_gmt":"2025-05-18T08:12:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=378702"},"modified":"2025-05-18T10:12:30","modified_gmt":"2025-05-18T08:12:30","slug":"who-will-choose-africas-energy-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=378702","title":{"rendered":"Who will choose Africa\u2019s energy future?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From CFACT<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Duggan Flanakin<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Just about everywhere you turn today, one conference after another focuses on African energy and minerals development. Each of these events has its own agenda \u2013 and there are key differences, notably between the Africa Energies Summit held in London this week and the upcoming African Energy Week in Cape Town at the end of September.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Africa is the birthplace of civilization, we are told, and yet it is the last continent (save Antarctica) to develop economically. The chief reason, it seems evident, is the 400-year-reign of mostly European colonialists who abandoned traditional inter-African trade routes to focus almost entirely on exports, whether of raw materials or enslaved people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Modern-day Africa only began to develop after World War II left European colonial powers willing to publicly yield to national liberation movements that all too often brought to power dictatorial governments that may well have been necessary, given centuries of disempowerment. Who else could stand up to, or at least make better deals with, their former conquerors?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even in those African nations that espoused democracy in the wake of their sudden independence, the quest for power (often pitting tribe against tribe, given that Western-drawn borders had little resemblance to traditional boundaries) led newly elected leaders to embrace graft, nepotism, and other forms of corruption to consolidate political power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Worse, Western nations continued to meddle in internal African affairs \u2013 often with (officially) non-governmental organizations carrying their neocolonialist water. Foreign \u201caid\u201d all too often meant bribery and\/or extortion, to the mutual benefit of dictatorial leaders and Western robber barons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a new generation of Africans who had never lived in the official colonial days began to take the reins of power, things slowly began to change. African awareness of their plight was heightened by the growth of cellular telephones and Internet access, and Western-educated Africans began to believe that Africans were capable of \u2013 and rightly ought to be \u2013 deciding their own futures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even today, Western power brokers all too often envision Africans as pawns in their own world games. Take the recent controversy over the 2025 Degrees Global Forum, a massive conference<\/a> held in Cape Town this month to promote solar radiation modification (SRM) \u2014 a geoengineering technology many believe will interfere with the Earth\u2019s atmosphere with possible catastrophic and unpredictable consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A HOME Alliance press release says \u201cSRM is not a neutral scientific endeavor but a neo-colonial political development that reflects deep asymmetries of power, knowledge, and accountability.\u201d Deploying or testing these risky, unproven, and dangerous methods in Africa would turn the continent into a laboratory for manipulating the atmosphere, land, and oceans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Worse, the SRM scheme had been flatly opposed by African ministers at 2023\u2019s African Ministerial Conference on the Environment, They called instead for a global governance mechanism for non-use<\/strong><\/em> of SRM. That stance echoed widespread concerns of scientists, academics, communities, and even climate and environmental justice groups worldwide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moreover, at the United Nations Environment Assembly in 2024, African countries had forced withdrawal of a resolution on SRM and strongly advocated for the Assembly to reaffirm a precautionary approach to all geoengineering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Power Shift Africa Senior Advisor Dean Bhekumuzi Bhebhe said, \u201cThey gather in Cape Town to debate spraying the sky, dimming the Sun, and tweaking the thermostat as if Earth were a malfunctioning machine and Africa, the test bench. But Africa is not an experimental testing ground\u2026. Geoengineering is not a solution; it\u2019s a techno-fantasy for avoiding real change.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then there are the competing energy conferences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back in January, leaders of 30 African nations at the Mission 300 Africa Energy Summit (AES) signed the Dar es Salaam Declaration, a landmark commitment to advancing access to electricity to 300 million Africans within the next five years. The declaration outlined key strategies to lower electricity costs, reduce dependence on firewood, and increase \u201cclean\u201d energy production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This conference, hosted by the Tanzanian government and the African Union, along with the African Development Bank Group and the World Bank Group, garnered additional financial commitments from British, French, and Asian investors in part to launch Zafiri, an investment company scaling decentralized renewable energy solutions. It included \u201cNational Energy Compacts\u201d to attract capital and cooperation to \u201cunlock green growth.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This past week\u2019s Africa Energies Summit in London unveiled the \u201cBig Five Top 50 Leaders\u201d \u2013 visionaries, innovators, and institutions shaping the future of Africa\u2019s energy sector. But African Energy Chamber executive director NJ Ayuk, whose organization is sponsoring African Energy Week in Cape Town in late September, publicly stated he would not attend or support the event.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ayuk admitted that \u201csome of you will be mad,\u201d but added, \u201cmy position is consistent: I don\u2019t patronize or speak at events that refused to hire or support black Africans. Local content is important to me and the African Energy Chamber. We are a new generation of Africans, and we have an obligation to ensure that Africans are respected in the oil sector that I love so much.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ayuk, who left a prosperous legal career to promote African-based and African-controlled energy development, started African Energy Week as a rebuff to a post-pandemic move of Africa Oil Week, sponsored by the London-based Hyve Group, from Cape Town to Dubai in 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ayuk intentionally scheduled the first African Energy Week to directly compete with the European-led meeting. The larger reason, though, for the new gathering was its very different purpose. As Ayuk put it, the dueling conferences provided a major confrontation between \u201cCancel Fossil Fuels\u201d (Dubai) and \u201cProtect Our Oil and Gas Industry\u201d (Cape Town).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This year\u2019s Africa Oil Week is moving from Cape Town (where, except for the plague year, it had been held for 30 years) to Accra, Ghana, in a new partnership with the Ghanaian government. The meeting, which adds \u201cEnergy\u201d to the title, is set for mid-September, two weeks before Ayuk\u2019s African Energy Week conclave in Cape Town.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The AOW: Energy press release says AOW is \u201cevolving to recreate its original vision of bringing together an exclusive senior network to foster meaningful business opportunities and relationships in the global energy landscape.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The focus, it appears, is on foreign investment, as AOW is designed to \u201cbridge the gap between industry stakeholders and government decision makers.\u201d But the website gives little information as to what types of projects AOW prefers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given that the Dubai AOW had focused on \u201cAfrica\u2019s energy transition efforts towards a cleaner environment,\u201d this year\u2019s AOW: Energy event appears to be an attempt at rebranding. It remains to be seen whether the rebranding is a smokescreen for continued Western dominance of the African continent\u2019s resource base.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By contrast, African Energy Week was created with the promise of making energy poverty history by 2030 and with panel discussions, investor forums, industry summits, and one-on-one meeting opportunities. The goal was to drive discussions that will reshape the trajectory of Africa\u2019s energy development toward greater African control for the benefit of Africans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The chutzpah of holding a solar radiation modification conference in a continent that has flatly rejected being a guinea pig clearly demonstrates that the 2025 Degrees Global Forum sponsors (and others) have not gotten the memo: Africans intend to determine their own energy futures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just about everywhere you turn today, one conference after another focuses on African energy and minerals development. Each of these events has its own agenda \u2013 and there are key differences, notably between the Africa Energies Summit held in London this week and the upcoming African Energy Week in Cape Town at the end of September.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121246920,"featured_media":378706,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","_crdt_document":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[691835146,691835147,691835148,691832975,691831333,691834976],"class_list":{"0":"post-378702","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"hentry","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-african-energy","9":"tag-african-energy-week","10":"tag-cape-town","11":"tag-non-governmental-organizations-ngos","12":"tag-raw-materials","13":"tag-solar-radiation-modification-srm","15":"fallback-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/01515451954-AdobeStock_597216344_Africa_tech_Network_1200x630.jpeg?fit=1200%2C630&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paxLW1-1Aw6","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":248524,"url":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=248524","url_meta":{"origin":378702,"position":0},"title":"Ayuk\u2019s a just transition: Blueprint for an African century","author":"uwe.roland.gross","date":"19\/03\/2023","format":false,"excerpt":"The 2020 African Youth Survey, sponsored by the Ichikowitz Family Foundation, found that 65 percent of the 4,200 African\u00a0youth surveyed\u00a0across 14 nations believed that the 21st Century will be \u201cthe African Century.\u201d","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/image-718.png?fit=1200%2C858&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/image-718.png?fit=1200%2C858&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/image-718.png?fit=1200%2C858&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/image-718.png?fit=1200%2C858&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/image-718.png?fit=1200%2C858&ssl=1&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":374481,"url":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=374481","url_meta":{"origin":378702,"position":1},"title":"Western Green mandates push Africa toward Moscow","author":"uwe.roland.gross","date":"10\/04\/2025","format":false,"excerpt":"African Energy Chamber founder and executive director NJ Ayuk is tired of European and American green energy pontificators demanding that Africa forgo developing its oil, coal, natural gas, and even nuclear resources. 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