malvernmugadzikwa
News24.com
South Africa Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy Gwede Mantashe said developed economies offering energy transition finance to African economies were using them as “guinea pigs” on which to perform energy experiments.
Mantashe was addressing the Africa Energy Week in Cape Town on Tuesday. The address comes ahead of a crucial COP27 meeting in Egypt in November, where SA is expected to present the plan for $8.5 billion in concessional loans and grants pledged at COP26 last year to help South Africa decarbonise its economy.
The address also comes after the minister’s keynote address to the Africa Oil Week and the 2022 Windaba earlier this month, where he criticised developed economies for trying to determine the terms of the energy transition in African countries.
Mantashe told delegates that advanced economies were looking to impose solutions on African countries for energy even though the African continent contributed less than 5% of global emissions despite having a population of over a billion.
“Developed countries sometimes want to use our individual countries as guinea pigs for experimenting. It’s painful, I must say that because when that happens, you get encircled … as a smaller economy, you forced to be a conduit of the ideas of others, you can’t think, you can’t be original,” said Mantashe.
Mantashe said South Africa entered into the agreement for the $8.5 billion on the understanding that a significant part of it would be grants, when the lion’s share of the finance turned out to be a basket of loans.
“We have this partnership between ourselves as South Africa and the EU and various states of the R8.5 billion [sic]. Quite impressive, and we thought that’s a gift. It’s not a gift. It’s a loan, part of it, [a] concessional loan, [a] very small part of it is actually a grant,” Mantashe said.
He said the terms of this funding, which dictated a shift away from coal power, were ill-timed for South Africa, as the country was getting billions in turnover from the coal industry and the European bloc of nations were looking at developing coal power as Russia restricted their access to gas after kicking off a military campaign in Ukraine.
“When we received it for the first time, it was R131 billion. And then we looked into the coal sector and one of the things central to this programme is we must move out of coal… an important sector here. And we discovered that in 2021, the turnover of the coal industry was R130 billion.”
He said that in “our arithmetic mind”, it meant that SA was told to “leave coal” for a R1 billion difference.
“It can’t make sense. And when you say that, sometimes in government, you almost sound like a rebel. You are supportive of funding, but it must talk to our programme,” he said.
Regarding the return of load shedding at Stage 4 on Tuesday morning, Mantashe said South Africans’ frustration could make them lose sight of the progress the country has made in increasing access to electricity, to the point where 87% of the country is electrified in some capacity.
“I can confess here that I left my high school without ever seeing electricity in my home. I never saw it. I was using lampies [lamps] – put a tin and put a twine, light it, and study. That’s how we grew up. All of us. And once you have access to electricity, you see the difference in terms of the convenience of living. That’s why people become angry when there is load shedding.
“Africans are suffering from energy poverty and this has been the case for too long that we tend to forget that energy poverty is an anomaly. We must turn this anomaly around, Africa must no longer wait. Changing this abnormality requires greater levels of commitment than before,” he said.
Referring to veteran journalist and the event’s moderator, Eleni Giokos, Mantashe said: “Eleni (Giokos) was talking about Emalahleni. That’s where she was born. I said to her, ‘Eleni, ten towns in Mpumalanga are in a continuous coal mining area’. Ten of them. For those who are from South Africa and those who want to visit, please check Belfast, check Ermelo, check Hendrina, check Ogies, check Middelburg, check Emalahleni, check Leandra, Kriel, you go to Delmas. All those towns are in one continuous mining region and if you just switch off [from coal], you are not considering the communities that are there”.
Bongani Ndlovu