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

Petrol has crossed R30 a litre, and the oil and gas crowd has rolled into Cape Town to tell us the answer is… more oil and gas. This week, KG, Zoë and Stephen read the terms and conditions on African Energy Week’s promise to end energy poverty, and find plenty of drilling, very little wind and a wine label you need to see to believe.

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.

“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.