eBusiness Weekly
Enacy Mapakame
The Covid-19 pandemic has plunged people deeper into energy insufficiency in the region, Zimbabwe included as funding dwindled.
The pandemic grounded economies to their knees leaving little or nothing for investments into key sectors such as energy, therefore further plunging countries into darkness.
Cases of power outages have been on the increase, not only in Zimbabwe but Zambia and South Africa with both businesses and homes condemned to as much as 12 hours a day of load-shedding as power generation fell.
Zimbabwean businesses have cited erratic power supplies as a major strain to capacity utilisation.
The United Nations (UN) says that while a greater share of the global population gained access to electricity in the last decade, the number of people without electricity in Sub-Saharan Africa increased.
According to the International Energy Agency, some gains in energy were reversed during the Covid-19 period and now as many as 30 million people who previously had access to electricity can no longer afford it.
The agency also highlights that more than 600 million Africans lacked access to electricity before the Covid-19 pandemic.
The African Energy Chamber (AEC) says the challenge has been worsened by Western groups targeting the African energy sector and filing lawsuits against financing African oil and gas projects, a growing and thriving industry.
Extraction of these energy sources has been deemed damaging to the climate and worsening the adverse impacts of climate change that are already being felt across the Sub Saharan Africa region.
The region has seen an increase in climate related disasters such as flash flooding with the worst experienced in 2019 when Cyclone Idai hit parts of Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi leaving a trail of destruction.
“They have engineered devastating public relations campaigns against Africans while their homes are powered by coal.
“Condemning Africans to poverty and misery is wrong. Preventing us from using our natural resources for our development while you take even our coal to Europe to power your wealthy lifestyle and keep our children in the dark is sinful,” reads part of a statement by the AEC.
“There is no denying that climate change is affecting Africa.
“ One has only to look at the extended drought in the south to see how devastating things can be when customary weather patterns are disrupted,” added AEC.
Despite the calls for climate action, the AEC says condemning Africa to energy poverty by denying funding for gas, oil and coal projects was unfair.
The whole region accounts for just 3 percent of the global greenhouse emissions but has felt the brunt of the adverse impacts of climate change, more than anywhere across the globe.
But the region has been pushing and taking advantage of climate conferences as an opportunity to compel developed countries to own up to their promises of availing US$100 billion fund every year for climate mitigation in developing countries like Africa, that have been battling the adverse impacts of climate change like flooding, droughts and other weather induced phenomena.
Financing is identified as an enabler to climate action.
A study by the African Development Bank (AfDB) says that to achieve universal electricity access for the nearly 1,3 billion Africans, some 600 million of whom are off the grid, an annual investment of between US$32 billion and US$40 billion should be pumped into the energy value chain.
The study, done under the auspices of the Bank’s New Deal on Energy for Africa, exposes a financing gap that stands between US$17 billion and US$25 billion, with the continent’s large economies like Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa accounting for some 33 percent of this deficit.
Currently, Africa’s most sophisticated economy, South Africa, is grappling with the worst energy crisis in years. Outages experienced by South Africa cost the continent 2 percent to 4 percent of its gross domestic product annually, according to the findings of the AfDB study.
