Kudzanai Sharara in CAPE TOWN, South Africa
AFRICA must stop looking outward for capital, technology and validation and build unified market intelligence to avoid wasting its energy investments, delegates at the CEO Africa Annual Roundtable heard yesterday.
The third day of the conference, running from October 6 to 10 under the theme “The Future of Africa: Innovate, Trade and Grow”, brought together several speakers whose contributions converged on a common argument: the continent’s constraints are largely self-imposed.
Opening the session “Smart Economies: Renewable Energy, Carbon Markets and Sustainability”, Dr Dahlia Garwe, Corporate and Industry Affairs Head at Hippo Valley Estates, said sustainability had moved beyond regulatory compliance and become a decisive source of competitive advantage.
“I’m sure you’ve seen this in your own companies — that for as long as you’re talking sustainability and even in Zimbabwe, it’s now an actual requirement from the accounting side,” she said.
“It enhances access to capital.”
She said companies that are competitive on environmental, social and governance metrics benefit from better access to finance and stronger participation in low-carbon global supply chains.
“What we’re saying here from the sustainability side is that it’s no longer about compliance. It is about competitiveness and long-term value creation,” Dr Garwe said.
The session’s sharpest exchange came when Dr Farzam Kamalabadi, chairman of Future Trends Group, challenged Ms Eunice Kamwendo, director of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) Sub-Regional Office for Southern Africa, over the absence of coordinated regional energy planning.
Dr Kamalabadi warned that multiple countries are racing to develop large solar installations on the assumption that they will export surplus power to their neighbours, without consulting one another.
“If Botswana wants to export to Zambia, well, Zambia is moving fast and it is going to export to Botswana and all of them think that they will export to the others.
“And there are seven or eight countries. We will soon have surplus, and it is not efficient, and most probably there will be a lot of assets on their hands that will be wasted,” he said.
He called for a unified market study to guide investment decisions, particularly for plants of 500 megawatts and above.
“This is limited investment money and yet all go and race with each other,” he said, drawing a parallel with provinces in China and India that compete without coordination.
Ms Kamwendo agreed; “I couldn’t agree with you more on that — market intelligence. I will certainly take this forward in terms of the market intelligence, because this is important and critical on a larger scale.”
She then identified a more immediate problem: grid absorption.
“We’re investing, yes, we have load capacity. But are we able to bring that capacity back into the grid? In most cases, not,” she said, citing a small system that generates 88 units but uses only 32, leaving about 50 going to waste.
Professor Thuli Madonsela, director of the Centre for Social Justice at Stellenbosch University, used her address on Africa’s global positioning in shifting trade and geopolitics to argue that the continent’s habit of looking abroad is a trap.
“One of the mistakes we do in this continent is we teach history starting from colonialism. In South Africa, we tend to start in 1652,” she said.
“It’s as if we have no history.”
She said this framing fails to “activate those genes of excellence” in African children and that she only learned a decade ago that Africans invented mathematics.
She cited binary numeration systems, astronomy methodologies and the continent’s first university as evidence of what Africa has achieved.
“I’m not talking about this for nostalgia. I’m mentioning this to show we were able to do these things,” she said. “But more importantly, we were trading inside the continent.”
She said Africa’s outward gaze extends to trade. “Because of their whole trust in each other — that’s called confidence in what each other can do — we look outside,” she said, describing this as “the trap of our outward eye when we’re looking at trade”.
Prof Madonsela singled out colleagues from across the Limpopo River who, she said, are deploying young people trained under the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences “to power their banks, to power their government departments”, adding: “This is not just a matter of training those colleagues. It’s also a matter of sovereignty.”
She invoked the concept of techno-feudalism, describing it as “operating on someone else’s terrain”, and said confidence is built by looking back at past achievement.
“It takes the confidence of knowing you have the capacity to translate difficult [things]. It takes the ability to know that difficult does not mean impossible,” she said. She pointed to the Pyramids as enduring evidence of what the continent has been capable of, saying, “those genes are still running in us”.
