My neighbour’s handyman says he hasn’t been feeling well lately, and his wife tells him it’s the news that’s making him sick. He doesn’t agree, but to please her he’s stopped buying newspapers, and he’s still got a TV in his workshop anyway. “I watch all the channels,” he tells me and he doesn’t sound that good either. News can affect you: some get sick, others get even.
News from Nigeria is that a brother there has begun re-engineering minibus taxis to convert them to electric rather than petrol power. Mustapha Gajibo, 30 years old and a university dropout, tells the interviewer with trademark enthusiasm and hubris: “As I am speaking to you now at our workshop, we are building a 12-seater bus which can cover up to 200 kilometres on one charge.’’ And he’s working on producing a solar-powered bus, so it’s not surprising his story was picked up around the world, as a rare “good news’’ story from Africa. Or just part of a subtle propaganda that wages a war while making the case for green energy?
What’s interesting about this happy news, though, is how it resonates with our experience here in SA. Nigeria is Africa’s biggest oil producer, yet its fuel is heavily subsidised and expensive. SA has some 200 years of coal reserves, but in our case we simply can’t seem to get it together for long enough to mine the coal, transport it, burn it to produce steam, and have more cheap electricity than we could imagine. Unlikely, yet sadly true.
How one reacts to the news is a function of one’s own mindset. In Nigeria one might reach several conclusions about the energy conundrum, among them to nationalise the fuel companies to ensure cheaper fuel and use that to produce cheaper electricity. I’m not sure whether they have an EFF there, but in any event that’s not going to happen. The other option is to build a solar-powered bus, literally, and sideswipe the whole rotten neocolonial petro-dictatorship governance model in favour of a greener and cleaner future.
Who could not argue a significant obstacle to a green future is governments, almost all of them, that survive on taxes and levies on energy sales?
Our Nigerian innovator’s bold first step, a mad first step, suggests a worldview that is the antidote to a society in which energy politics dominates and shapes the lives of ordinary people way out of proportion to what should be tolerated by free folk. Who could not argue a significant obstacle to a green future is governments, almost all of them, that survive on taxes and levies on energy sales? The day we have solar-powered cars and houses will be an up-yours to dictators and regimes around the world, and is for now a lingering threat to the existing old-world order built on superpower fossil-fuel hegemony.
In this vein, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s criminal assault on Ukraine has become the world’s first energy war. In the past the Middle East and its oil were the feared flashpoint for war. Now it’s Russia and its gas, with Putin holding a sword over European Union nations that grew rich on his gas while holding their noses in their political dealings with him.
This week the European Commission doubled down on weaning the region off Russian oil and gas, which it called an “economic and political weapon that cost European taxpayers nearly €100bn per year”. This “double urgency to transform Europe’s energy system” it also linked to “tackling the climate crisis’’. It said “85% of Europeans believe that the EU should reduce its dependency on Russian gas and oil as soon as possible to support Ukraine’’. It recommended “energy savings, diversification of energy supplies and accelerated rollout of renewable energy to replace fossil fuels in homes, industry and power generation’’.
On the day the EU stepped up its scramble for clean energy to frustrate Putin, United Nations chief António Guterres spoke to the whole world in a video address in which he gave details of the new battle plan for Ukraine, otherwise known as “the peace project of the 21st century”, to “end fossil fuel pollution and accelerate the renewable energy transition before we incinerate our only home … transforming energy systems is low-hanging fruit”.
I was wondering how the added bonus of saving the planet by beating Putin goes down in the Union Buildings and where that leaves us with our abundant coal and power cuts and a not-so-secret admiration for the dictator and how he’s sticking it to the West, which is what we like to think we do. Especially because the West insists we move to clean energy and wants to offer us $8bn in loans to ease our necessary “just energy transition’’. To some extent, this was the question raised in a recent piece by our thoughtful former statistician-general, Pali Lehohla, now a professor at the University of Johannesburg.
He read the news and came to arguably an entirely different conclusion to most of the rest of the planet, which was, “the world is heading to the black rock for energy cover. We should do the same and abandon this debilitating spin doctoring.” This likely refers to the apparent climate “spin’’ behind a push by the West to dictate to SA its energy options and allegedly place the responsibility for its historic emissions on a developing country. I cite him because he is representative of a doctrine of resource nationalism that has become part of our political discourse as solutions to the power crisis are discussed.
He says: “It is time we looked into the dental composition of the $8bn energy transition gift horse from the world rushing to the black rock. The gift horse may turn out to be the real Trojan Horse.’’
Whether this horse (gift and Trojan) has anything to do with the “dead horse” of Eskom that Andre de Ruyter once complained about having to flog is not specified. More coal? But even the coal we burn now doesn’t keep the lights on. A bigger hammer?
We all get the same news, but digest it quite differently. Some see black, others see green; some build solar-powered taxis, others wear shades.
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