Being Goodwill Message to the Africa Energy Forum @OTC2024, May 7, 2024
Delivered virtually by Omar Farouk Ibrahim, Secretary General, APPO
- Thank you for the invitation to be part of this Conference and to deliver a Keynote address. And thank you for the great contributions you are making towards ensuring that Africa finds its rightful place on the agenda of global energy discourse.
- The theme of your conference The Future of Energy Transformation in Africa: Clean Energy and Business Sustainability, as you rightly noted underscores the critical importance of innovative strategies and solutions in addressing environmental challenges while fostering sustainable business growth within the Africa energy domain.
- So what are the innovative strategies and solutions? Many presentations that I have seen and publications I have read purporting to give innovative strategies and solutions to the imminent challenges posed to the African energy sector by the global energy transition, have, in reality not been innovative.
- They are old wines in new bottles. They are strategies developed by the very people who are driving the transition agenda, who also are the very people who created the mess called climate challenge. These are the very people who over a period of a century and a half released over 2500 gigatons of emissions into the atmosphere. Africa is said to have contributed some 3% of global emissions even when we have nearly 18% of the world’s population.
- To us in Africa, innovative strategies and solutions to addressing environmental challenges must take into account the imminent existential challenges that energy poverty pose to our people.
- In a continent where two-thirds of its nearly 1.5 billion population live without access to modern energy, forced to rely on traditional forms of energy like fire wood, crop waste, and cow dungs for cooking and home heating, where more than 50% of its population have no access to electricity, where a vast majority of the world’s 2.3 million annual premature deaths due to household air pollution are recorded, where a vast majority of the people are still grappling with the basics of life like three square meals, health, education and accommodation, addressing environmental challenges must necessarily take a second place to these existential challenges.
- In Africa, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, a vast majority of the population is still grappling with how to meet the basics of life, namely food, health, education, accommodation and transportation etc, which a vast majority of the population of the developed world has come to accept as givens. That being so, it makes no sense to impose the priorities of the developed world which is largely comfortable living on the poor countries and peoples of Africa.
- Strategic innovations and solutions to the environment challenges cannot therefore be uniform. Africans will be naïve to expect that those who are responsible for the destruction of our common patrimony, namely the atmosphere, will come up with solutions that take into consideration Africans peculiar circumstances. What is more likely to happen is for them to come up with palliatives that create the impression that a favor is being done to Africa by providing them innovative solutions to addressing the climate challenge.
- That is how the climate fund for mitigation and adaptation or loss and damage should be understood. They are being dangled before African leaders, some of who covetously do everything they could to get a piece of it, even if it means mortgaging the future of their energy security.
- The current challenge to Africa was thrown up by the global paradigm shift away from fossil fuels to renewable energies. If we have accepted that energy transition has thrown up new challenges to Africa’s business sustainability, it makes sense to also accept that the solutions to the new challenges can best be found in a new paradigm shift in the search for solutions. The old paradigms will not work, because they ask for more of the same thing, especially from the poor countries.
- A completely new way of examining the challenge is called for. Ways that are different from the received wisdom from the developed countries. And this, to me, is the challenge I throw to African intellectuals and thought leaders. Stop regurgitating what you hear or read from others who have no empathy with your situation.
- I thank you for your kind attention
