Africans must reconsider their positions on fossil fuels, and compel financial institutions operating in Africa to fund coal, oil and gas power plants.
By Peter Wanyonyi
South Africa, Africa’s most advanced and most sophisticated economy, is reeling under punishing electricity rationing. Operational failures, insufficient generating capacity, and an unwillingness to invest in new power plants have combined to create a disaster in waiting, as the country’s electricity monopoly, Eskom, hikes electricity tariffs to service debt. It is estimated that, at any given time, over a third of Eskom’s total capacity is offline due to power rationing.
Kenya’s power-rationing story hardly needs retelling. Despite the talking heads at KenGen mealy-mouthing the now-tired “we generate more electricity than we need” every day, Kenya continues to experience crippling “load-shedding” – as Kenya Power stiffly calls it – practically daily. Kenya Power’s Twitter account, ironically called “@KenyaPower_Care” reads like a tale of electricity woe: on any given day, the account posts notices of hundreds of urban and rural areas affected by what Kenya Power euphemistically calls “planned maintenance”.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been noteworthy for the high “war premium” that it has slapped onto energy prices worldwide. Vladimir Putin decided to unleash hell on Ukraine at the same time as the world’s economies were sinking under the weight of nonsensical, economy-destroying Covid policies that have so far achieved nothing, given that everyone is getting infected with Covid anyway. As distribution networks slowed down to a crawl and export and import processing were hit by stay-at-home Covid isolation diktats worldwide, the only energy distribution still happening reliably was gas and oil transported by pipelines. Europe, in particular, was energy-safe even during its disastrous Covid policies, as Russian oil and gas continued to come in via the giant pipeline network that carries Russian hydrocarbons into the heart of Europe.
The war changed all that. The American military-industrial complex, seeing a chance to defeat old adversary Russia once and for all, pressured its NATO allies into imposing sanctions on Russia. Moscow’s main export commodity is energy and related by-products, so the piffling sanctions on grain and travel that were initially imposed meant little and achieved nothing. Western media tried to put a positive spin on a war that Ukraine was obviously losing, but in the end the brutal truth outed: despite daily shipments of American and British weaponry, Ukraine was outgunned and losing territory fast. When Ukrainian soldiers holed up in a steel plant in Mariupol surrendered to Russian forces, Western media put out stories claiming the Ukrainians had been “evacuated”. Buried deep in the stories was the glaring truth: the Ukrainians had been “evacuated” by Russian forces into Russian territories. In other words, the Ukrainians had surrendered and had been taken prisoner.
The media stories aside, Russian energy continued flowing into Europe despite the sanctions – since the war, Russia has made more money selling oil and gas to Europe than it did last year. Eventually, the optics of this contradiction got to NATO, and some European countries decided to reduce their reliance on Russian oil and gas. They imposed steeper sanctions on Russia, and Moscow retaliated by drastically reducing its oil and gas supplies to several European countries, with a threat to extend the reduction to all of Europe.
Europe panicked. How to deal with the inevitable chaos that reduced energy supplies would mean? The economic heart of Europe is Germany, an exporting country, and its social coherence stems from the ability of its economy to provide jobs to its people. Reduced energy supplies would mean economic stagnation in Germany – and Europe: Germany drives the European economy. To make matters worse, the Germans have shut down all but a couple of their nuclear power plants, following through on a pledge made by their former leader, Angela Merkel, after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011. They were staring into an energy abyss.
Left unsaid thus far is the role that “green energy” played in this economic and social saga. Over the last 20 years, Western politics has come to be dominated by the “green lobby”, an alliance of hard-left Socialist anti-industry political groupings opposed to anything that looks like industrial or economic advancement. They have put the myth of “man-made global warming” (now called “climate change” after they realised their predictions of global warming were in conflict with observed instances of the earth not warming or even cooling) front and centre of Western politics and have captured the political and academic institutions of the West so completely that there’s no Western leader today who does not worship at the altar of “man-made climate change”.
Their bugbear of the moment is fossil fuels – coal, gas, oil – which they blame for “raising the earth’s temperature”. This lobby has ensured that, over the last couple of decades, most investments in energy generation have gone into their favourite energy sources – wind and solar. The dirty little secret of Europe was, however, this: even as they sang the “renewables” song, they quietly kept their oil and gas power plants running, and backed them up with coal plants. Together, oil, gas and coal provide the most reliable, weather-independent power generation today – other than nuclear, which the Socialist Left hates. And Europe’s oil and gas predominantly come from Russia – a consequence of Vladimir Putin’s clever geopolitical investments since he came to power (it has been claimed that Putin funds Western “Green Energy” lobby groups).
And so, when Russia reduced its supplies of oil and gas to Europe (it instead turned them around and is now selling them mostly to China, India, and the rest of Asia), Europe’s electricity security disappeared overnight.
And herein lies the lesson for Africa.
Europe’s leaders did not ramp up investment in wind and solar to make up for the anticipated shortfall as a result of reduced supplies of Russian oil and gas. On June 20th, the governments of Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, and other European countries announced that they were restarting their closed coal power plants and would keep them running for the foreseeable future. They will import coal from Africa and Australia, as well as tapping Europe’s own vast coal reserves, to ensure that their populations keep receiving cheap, abundant energy. What about global warming, which the Europeans have been preaching around the world for 20 years? Not a peep of it was heard. Faced with a crippling energy deficit and an immediate drop in living standards, Europe quickly forgot that “the planet is warming, and coal is unacceptable”, and fired up its coal power plants.
What does all this have to do with African energy policy? Everything, as it turns out.
On 26th June 2019, Kenya halted the planned Lamu Coal Power Station, which would have added 1,050 MW of cheap coal-fired electricity onto the national grid. The campaign to stop the investment was led by the United Nations, whose Secretary General, the Portuguese Socialist Antonio Guterres, says investment in coal and other fossil fuels is “just delusional”. At the time of writing this article, Mr Guterres has not said anything about Europe’s decision to re-open its coal power plants.
Nearly all African countries have signed the Paris Climate Agreement and have pledged not to allow investment in fossil-powered electricity plants. Africa also faces concerted anti-fossil fuel demands from Western NGOs and West-dominated international institutions, and is continually urged to invest in unreliable “renewables” like wind and solar. Africa, home to 20 percent of the world population, accounts for less than 4 percent of world electricity use. This situation has devastating knock-on effects. Over 60 percent of Africa’s healthcare facilities lack electricity, making reliable responses to health emergencies impossible. Few schools in Africa have any electricity, and the job-creating impact of cheap electricity in rural areas is simply absent, contributing to the high unemployment seen all over Africa.
Africa is also abundantly blessed with hydrocarbon resources. All over Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Congo, and the rest of Africa are untapped fossil fuels that would offer literally thousands of years of energy security for Africa. The renewable sources favoured by Western socialist lefties, such as wind and solar, are weather-dependent, and so additional backup power investment has to be made so as to plug the gap when the wind is not blowing, or the sun is not shining. The result: African electricity is the most expensive in the world, and hence few Africans can afford it. This in turn means Africa’s electricity producers and distributors cannot make money and are forced to live with crippling debt: Kenya Power, for example, owes creditors over Sh100 billion in debt.
Europe’s example in turning back to coal should be Africa’s chance to invest in coal and gas. But challenges remain. For example, major Western banking and other investment institutions refuse to fund fossil fuel projects in Africa (although they are happy to fund them in Europe). Even worse, though, are Africa’s own institutions. The African Development Bank, a critical channel of infrastructure project funding in Africa, will not fund fossil fuel projects in Africa. The United Kingdom, which is also turning back to coal as energy prices rise, ended its funding of fossil fuel power projects in Africa in 2021.
These challenges are not insurmountable. There are African lenders who will still fund oil, gas and coal projects. The fact that Europe has gone back to coal should provide plenty of PR cover for such funders – there’s nothing quite as useful as pointing out someone’s hypocrisy to shut them down. China is also an option, but one that should be approached with care – as this column has variously pointed out, China’s loans are trojan instruments of economic and, eventually, political control. But beggars can’t be choosers.
Europe has shown Africa that Western condemnations of coal and other fossils is little more than a tool the West uses to keep Africa energy-deprived. This, perversely, allows European and American companies to buy up African coal, oil and gas at cheap prices – and then send them to the West for processing and use, creating jobs and lifting the living standards of their people while Africans continue to languish in abject poverty and appalling energy insecurity.
Keeping Africa poor under the guise of “fighting climate change” has been the West’s go-to oppression tool for the last 30 years or so. Africa cannot depend on the West to reverse this situation, and must now put its own and its people’s interests first. Giving Africans better access to education, healthcare, and housing will not be possible without extensive investment in fossil fuels for energy generation. For agriculture to grow, investment in fossil fuels is a must (fertilizer is a by-product of fossil refining).
African countries must reconsider their positions on fossil fuels, and must compel financial institutions operating in Africa to fund coal, oil and gas power plants. The poor people of Africa need electricity today, just like Europeans do. But, whereas the Europeans ensure that their people receive what they need, our leaders are bought by Western interests to ensure that we never get what we need to grow and escape poverty.
This must change, and quickly. Europe’s U-turn on coal is a welcome opportunity that Africa must not let slip by.
— The author is an information systems professional.
