Most of sub-Saharan Africa is, candidly, a mess. Long held by the nations of Europe as colonies, the various nations of Africa were kind of left in the lurch when the European powers, post-WW2 for the most part, pulled out precipitously without ensuring that the African nations' governments and institutions were up to the task of leading those peoples into the modern, technological world. The result? The rise of warlords/dictators from Idi Amin to Robert Mugabe, a continent in grinding poverty, millions of people living in what are essentially Stone Age conditions.
Three things could produce an African Renaissance: liberty, capitalism, and energy. The Western world can't do much about the first two; that's something the people of the various nations of Africa will have to work out for themselves. The one thing the West could help with is energy development. But American and European climate scolds seem determined to prevent any energy development. It is, in effect, a re-colonizing of Africa.
In 2024, it is unconscionable that over 600 million Africans still lack access to electricity. In sub-Saharan Africa, only 28% of healthcare facilities have reliable electricity. More than 900 million people cook with traditional biomass like wood and animal dung, inhaling toxic fumes that claim over 600,000 African lives each year. Clean water remains a luxury for vast swaths of the population.
As has been shown in parts of Asia, these problems can be alleviated over time with robust investment in fossil fuels. Coal and natural gas can provide affordable and reliable electricity, and natural gas can immediately reduce deaths from the pollution of dirty cooking fuels.
Sub-Saharan Africa has ample fossil fuel resources: Nigeria, Congo, Gabon, and Chad have oil reserves, while Nigeria also has the largest natural gas reserves on the continent. The energy is there for the taking. And the bar is set so low now that it wouldn't take a great deal to make a huge impact on the lives of millions of Africans. But climate scolds don't want that to happen, campaigning instead for expensive and unreliable "green" sources.
Consider that a single electric car charging overnight in Europe consumes as much power as an entire African village uses in a week. Such stark disparities are not mere numbers. They represent battle lines in the daily struggle for survival of Africa’s impoverished.
In this light – or rather, darkness –nations find themselves ensnared in a global madness, their potential extinguished like fire without oxygen, smothered by the very lack of what’s needed to fuel their ascent.
Foreign-funded anti-fossil fuel activism, cloaked in the language of climate alarmism, blocks pathways to development that Western nations themselves traversed in their journey to prosperity.
It gets worse. Some African institutions have even bought into the green energy advocacy. And Africans are being dragged in with promises of a pittance in return for being a paid protestor for an issue they don't really understand.
The African Development Bank announced in 2019 that it would no longer finance coal projects. In 2021, it went further and placed severe restrictions on oil and gas investments. The World Bank followed suit.
Now, even domestic efforts of Africans to rejuvenate their oil and gas sector are being opposed by paid activists from Europe. There was heavy opposition to the Africa Energy Week event in South Africa, with European-funded protesters appearing at the African Energy Chamber’s Johannesburg offices.
“Some of the protesters … from the poorest townships didn’t even know why they were there, having been promised only $5 and a meal for their participation,” said NJ Ayuk, the Chamber’s executive chairman. “Africans deserve better than to be used for foreign agendas.
It's quite a mess — but while the Western world already has an energy infrastructure in place, as well as generating capacity, much of Africa just simply hasn't yet got to that point, and if these Western climate scolds get their way, much of Africa never will get to that point.
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Africa will never rise above what it is right now without energy and plenty of it. Granted, they are also limited by their governments and market systems; Africa will remain, in many ways, the Dark Continent until corrupt governments and command economies somehow are ousted. But something that Westerners consider as elementary to day-to-day life as reliable electricity would make a dramatic change in the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
The nations of the West, along with the energy sectors from those nations, should be helping Africa, not hindering them. Africa's path to modernization will literally spring from Africa's own fossil fuel resources and will follow the power lines. The West can help Africa in this venture — oh, and in doing so, create a lot of good-paying extraction and infrastructure jobs in some of the poorest areas on the planet — or else someone else will. Some other nation, one that's not necessarily a friend to the Western world and who won't have the best interests of either Africa or the West at heart.
Some other nation like China.
