POLITICALLY AWEH: Drill, Baby, Drill — Who’s reading the fine print at African Energy Week?

South Africans inland are now paying R30.25 a litre for 95 petrol after October’s R3.33 hike, a record driven by global oil prices and geopolitical tension far beyond our borders.  

Into this mess walks African Energy Week (AEW) with the theme “Invest in African Energies: Affordable and Abundant Energy Additions”. 

The pitch is that drilling for oil in Africa will boost local supply and bring prices down. Except that’s not how petrol works. Oil is priced on the global market, so a barrel pumped off our coast sells at the same price as one pumped anywhere else. Your tank won’t notice the difference.

So we went through this year’s agenda.

“Gas” appears 82 times. “Oil”, 64. “Renewable” scrapes in at 15, “solar” gets two mentions and “wind” gets zero. There’s no space set aside for civil society, youth or workers either, and no mention of the Paris Agreement or net-zero targets. 

There is, however, an African Farmout Forum selling oil blocks, a stage called “The Drill Room” and a whole session on the fundamentals of fracking. Affordable and abundant, indeed.

Energy analyst Chris Yelland didn’t mince his words: “African Energy Week is essentially the coal, oil and gas conference and exhibition.” Renewables and battery storage, he told us, are significantly underrepresented.

The renewables industry noticed too. Titania Stefanus-Zincke, interim CEO of the South African Wind Energy Association (SAWEA), said the agenda’s thin focus on renewables is why the association chose not to attend. A shame, given that “Africa has more than 58,000 gigawatts of onshore [wind energy] potential. Only 0.02% has actually been realised”.

Frank Spencer of the South African Photovoltaic Industry Association (SAPVIA) agreed that AEW caters more to oil and gas companies, although he said “the cheapest way to get energy to people today is with low-cost renewables and batteries”.  

AEW has also helped itself to the language of climate justice. The conference was founded on a promise to make energy poverty history – strong words for a conference that charges $4,000 for an all-access ticket. The week even opens with a “Just Energy Transition” concert. Kapwani Kavenuke of Power Shift Africa isn’t buying it. “A ‘just transition’ would look like a $4,000 ticket not being $4,000 in the beginning,” she said. 

Kavenuke points to a recent report by Power Shift Africa, Pipe Dreams: How Oil and Gas Fail to Deliver Economic Development in Africa. It concluded that fossil fuels have not delivered sustained or inclusive economic development.

Worse, she says, the communities living near drilling projects are the ones paying for them: “Communities tell you: we were paid to move away, and two years later this money did not help me. We don’t have electricity. We’ve got no jobs. Our waters are being polluted.”  

Then there’s the man at the top. NJ Ayuk, executive chairman of the African Energy Chamber, which runs AEW, gave this year’s opening address. In 2007, the former congressional intern pleaded guilty to illegally using a US congressman’s stationery and signature stamp to try to obtain visas for people from Cameroon. A man of letters, then.

Stephen told us about his experience at the 2023 AEW. He was protesting outside with Extinction Rebellion when busloads of people arrived carrying identical placards reading “Drill Baby Drill” and “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels”.

When the activists spoke to them, many said they’d been paid R200 and told they were protesting to end load shedding. Plenty were actually worried about climate change and in favour of renewables. 

There’s a word for this: astroturfing. It means faking grassroots support so that it looks like ordinary people strongly support a specific cause. 

This year, the slogan has graduated from placards to bottles. The African Energy Chamber has launched Drill Baby Drill wine, a Chardonnay and Pinot Noir made by Elgin’s Lothian Vineyards. No, really.

The irony? Climate change is already squeezing South Africa’s wine industry. Charlie Brain, co-founder of Lubanzi Wines, told us the country “had one of its earliest harvests on record… some people were harvesting in December. It affects whether you can make wine in the first place”. Spain, he added, has just had its earliest harvest in two or three hundred years.

For a palate cleanser, we visited South Africa’s first Citizens’ Assembly, which comprises 73 randomly selected Capetonians, chosen to reflect the city’s demographics. The focus is on building a transport system that’s fair, reliable and affordable while cutting emissions. At the end of the assembly, the citizens will share recommendations with policy-makers. 

Ordinary people getting a say in their energy future? More of that, please. DM

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