The new president of the African Development Bank (AfDB), Nigeria’s Akinwunmi Adesina, recently stated his belief that Africa has no reason not to have universal energy access by 2025. In furtherance of that, he has announced an initiative with specific targets – to spend $55bn by 2025 to deliver 90GW (90,000MW) across Africa. As yet another round commences in the annual dialogues between the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) and the Federal Government, it is appropriate to focus on what, apart from leadership, is perhaps Africa’s single biggest challenge – access to clean, affordable, constant, quality electricity supply.
The need is even more so as his statement comes just as the UN General Assembly signed up to achieving its Global Goals by 2030 and as the next round of climate change talks are about to start in Paris. No African leader at any level has ever made such a bold and forward-looking statement for the continent. First, Adesina specifically mandated UNIVERSAL ACCESS TO ELECTRICITY as an important continental objective. Second, he dared to publicly mention financing requirements for a single sector that appear to be truly daunting. It is very exciting that someone so important in Africa finally has the gumption to publicly start driving Africa to focus on the single biggest continental issue of the day.
Yet, there are issues. $55bn will not deliver universal access to the 1bn-plus people Africa will have by 2025. It will barely tickle the problem. The 90-GW capacity target is not high enough, the human resources are not there to deliver even that and the time to deliver even $55bn worth of capacity is probably too short. Assuming we use the cheapest, most efficient technology currently available – combined-cycle gas thermal, at today’s costs $55bn will deliver barely 15GW across the full fuel supply generation-transmission-distribution value chain. Policy makers tend to ignore this and focus on building big, shiny generating plants, not realising that these are just one-quarter of the equation.
However, this takes nothing away from the great importance of what, for want of a better name, I will call the Adesina Targets. Even if it is not far-reaching enough, it is a bold, timely and much-needed statement of intent. This puts good pressure on leaders of the continent to focus sharply on what must be done – data gathering to establish a baseline, policy-making to establish a common vision and plans/programmes that will turn vision and targets into reality. The important thing is that someone with the capacity and the desire to drive the attainment of whatever goals are set has set the challenge for Africa.
The immediate task is to amass the data, use it to interrogate and validate the Adesina Targets and have them discussed and adopted by African Heads of State in the shortest possible time. They and their ministers must buy-in. Only in this way will the Targets evolve into a Protocol that African countries are obliged to implement, with a framework for ensuring agreed actions are taken. It will not be easy but this time, however, there is a difference. The Target-Protocol will be market- and data-driven and backed by Africa’s own development finance institution, which will in turn serve to rally the private sector behind the imperative of achieving these targets.
The AfDB undoubtedly has the capacity to push its African member countries to embark on the policy dialogues that lead to clarity. The next stage will be to bring policy-driven reform and Africa’s myriad opportunities together with finance, project design and management capacity, human resources and the harsh reality of the marketplace. Very few individual African countries have bitten this bullet and the rest have to join the train.
Africa’s biggest challenge in squaring the electricity circle is a three-sided financial-technical-demographic riddle. Starting from our very low capacity base, how do we rapidly upgrade our energy networks to that level that catalyses high rate socio-economic growth? And, having attained that level (probably in decades to come), how do we ensure that further capacity expansions meet population growth and its accompanying demand?
To be sure, given the urban focus of existing electricity networks as against the concentration of our unserved populations in rural areas, we must evolve new policy precepts, project development and financing frameworks that address the universal access challenge. We must encourage and take advantage of the science and technology behind renewable energy systems and electricity storage. These offer exciting prospect of rapidly building out distribution networks and bypassing the need for expensive transmission lines.
Our education systems must improve to produce and train the army of engineers, project managers, economists, lawyers, accountants and research scientists required to design, finance, build and operate and maintain these new African electricity networks. The bottom line is that it will be the work of many lifetimes. Needless to say, however, we in Africa have loitered, stagnated and frittered away countless opportunities for so long that it just has to be finally time that we woke up to our duty.
Whatever targets are ultimately adopted, they will NOT BE ACHIEVED unless key regional leaders like Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Congo, Egypt, Morocco and Ethiopia get their act together. In the case of West Africa and ECOWAS, the reality is that 50 percent of the people to be addressed by any targets live in Nigeria. Our country is both the engine room and the soft underbelly of West Africa; and to a considerable extent, of Africa too. Our national leaders appear never to have never really grasped this existential fact and factored it into our national strategy, our policy, and our plans/programmes. The consequences are plain for all to see.
It’s time we did the right things (data-vision-strategy-policy-plans-programmes) in our energy (oil, gas, electricity) sector. Nigeria can and should refine products, process/transport gas and generate/transport electricity for West Africa and parts of Central Africa. Regional leaders in other parts of Africa should do the same in their economic areas. Until each get the hang of doing it for ourselves, we cannot do it for Africa. If we cannot do it for Africa, others will come from outside Africa to do it for us.
Nigeria, Africa must seize this moment or it will be gone, probably for good. This is the essence of the Adesina Targets.
Eyo O. Ekpo
Ekpo, during the past 15 years, has been Leader of the Power Sector Reform Team at Nigeria’s privatisation agency (BPE); Attorney-General of Cross River State; Team Leader, Regulatory and Transactions Monitoring at the Power Sector Reform Team; and, until very recently, Commissioner for Market Competition and Rates and then Consumer Affairs at the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC).
