Africa’s energy sector is at a defining crossroads. While the continent holds vast untapped reserves of oil, gas, and renewables, unlocking this potential remains hindered by regulatory bottlenecks, financing constraints, and fragmented regional markets. At the same time, governments face the dual challenge of meeting urgent energy needs for growing populations while aligning with long-term climate goals. In this interview, Verner Ayukegba, Senior Vice President at the African Energy Chamber, brings a unique vantage point to the debate.
In his role, he leads the Chamber’s international outreach and public policy initiatives, working closely with governments and stakeholders to design frameworks that attract capital and accelerate investment into Africa’s energy future. Beyond this, Verner serves as Director at Johannesburg-based DMWA Resources, where he heads the firm’s energy and financial services consulting practice. His career spans diverse roles, from Principal Analyst for Sub-Saharan Africa at IHS Markit, where he advised institutional investors on economic and country risks, to Finance Director for an East African oil and gas company, and earlier experience in London with Fidelity International and State Street Global Advisors.
An experienced management consultant, Verner has guided clients in navigating negotiations with banks, financial institutions, and central banks, and remains a frequent voice in international conferences and media commentary on African energy. Fluent in English, French, and German, with an MBA from Kingston University London, he brings not only technical expertise but also a global outlook on Africa’s pressing policy questions.
This interview explores his insights on regulatory reform, financing, regional harmonization, and the delicate balance between energy equity and transition.
What specific regulatory reforms do you recommend to accelerate permitting and licensing for energy projects (particularly renewables, gas, and upstream oil)? How should governments balance speed with environmental and social safeguards?
Put simply: cut the red tape, and be honest about safeguards. Investors come where rules are public and processes are predictable. If projects are to reach final investment decision (FID) across Africa, governments must recognise a basic truth: the principal obstacle is often administrative and bureaucratic constraints rather than geology. Developers and financiers are routinely forced to go through multiple rounds, thus causing delays that add to project costs and operational delays. That bureaucratic replay turns weeks into years and drives lenders away.
Theoretically, the most effective reform is to agree on standardised, facilitated procedures so that the heavy lifting is done once and reused by every subsequent project: publish pre-templated production-sharing contracts, transport and fiscal terms upfront; adopt basin-level environmental and social baselines; and mandate parallel reviews rather than sequential clearances.
Speed cannot, however, come at the expense of legitimacy. A mediation desk that requires administrative disputes to be resolved inside the system before litigants go to court, phased permits tied to mitigation milestones, escrowed community funds, and monitored mitigation bonds are practical tools to balance pace with protection.
How can policy frameworks ensure that financing (public, private, multilateral) supports both energy access and the energy transition; e.g. what mix of incentives, guarantees, subsidies, carbon pricing, etc. is most effective?
Policy must make projects bankable for private investors while protecting public interest, and for Africans, that means we must ensure that we have the right fiscal policies to make project returns attractive. Gas exploration returns must not only meet more than average global returns, but they should also be geared towards enabling domestication and in-country commercialisation of Gas.
Investors do not finance intentions; they finance cash flows. So the first job of policy is to create credible demand for gas and oil that translates into predictable revenue: domestic offtake contracts for power stations, take-or-pay anchors for fertiliser or industrial plants, and regional offtakes that link resource countries to consumer markets. A key problem today is structural: many African states are resource producers, not resource consumers. There is plenty of gas and oil on the continent, but domestic and regional demand is too weak or too fragmented to absorb it. That mismatch, resource countries on one side and market countries on the other, is why projects are built for export while homes go dark and factories wait for fuel. The finance framework must therefore do two things at once: create credible buyers inside Africa, and remove the early-stage risks that prevent lenders from committing capital.
Governments must use concessional capital strategically, not as a permanent subsidy. Multilateral and development finance should underwrite the riskiest, front-end tasks, project preparation, basin SEAs, resettlement frameworks, and limited political-risk guarantees, because those early costs kill bankability in frontier markets. Packaged advisory plus pre-approved financing and guarantees, the same mechanics that drove success in standardised procurement programmes elsewhere, lower transaction costs, and attract competitive bids; applied to gas and LNG projects, they shorten timelines and reduce spreads.
An effective policy mix blends instruments to answer specific risks: political-risk guarantees and insurance to calm lenders; local-currency hedging or credit lines to protect domestic buyers; time-limited tax and customs relief for heavy capex items pegged to delivery and local-value milestones; and targeted viability-gap funds or output-based subsidies to make rural or social-access projects bankable. But these must be conditional and transparent; permanent operating subsidies are a fiscal trap.
We should be pragmatic about carbon instruments. Carbon pricing is politically and technically difficult across much of the continent and should not be the centrepiece of near-term project finance. If introduced, it must be phased, modest, and revenue-recycled into social protection and access programmes.
What role do you see for harmonisation of fiscal and regulatory regimes across African countries (or regions) to attract cross-border investment, reduce risk, and avoid duplication?
Harmonisation matters because capital chases scale and certainty. Africa has resources in one place and buyers in another; when each country insists on its own rules, projects that should be regional, pipelines, refineries, and long-distance interconnectors become a string of small, uneconomic national projects. Harmonisation is not an optional nicety: it is a commercial lever that reduces transaction costs, shortens timetables and lowers the country-risk premium investors demand.
We see the upside already in West Africa, where coordinated planning for the Ghana–Côte d’Ivoire interconnector and the broader WAPP programme is moving from talk to concrete implementation and unlocking financing to connect markets. That process proves a simple point: when grid codes, procurement plans and market rules are aligned, trade follows and unit costs fall.
We also see the downside in cross-border oil infrastructure when standards and expectations diverge. The East African crude pipeline (EACOP) became a financing and reputational battleground because lenders, insurers, civil society and affected states were not operating to a shared set of expectations; that dissonance prompted major banks and insurers to withdraw and raised costs dramatically.
Practically, harmonisation should be driven by a simple, phased logic: start with what removes obvious duplication and scales supply chains, then widen the alignment to cover contracts, dispute mechanisms and etc. Begin with mutual-recognition pilots: accept a neighbour’s basin or corridor when it meets an agreed template, and allow supplier certification or local-content registration from one market to be valid in another. Mutual recognition is not new to the continent — MRAs are already used in professional qualifications and trade, and they translate directly into time and cost savings for energy projects. Parallel to mutual recognition, regional model documents should be published. For instance, AfCFTA’s Investment Protocol and its associated workstreams create a legal and institutional backdrop that can make these model instruments meaningful across borders, by reducing legal fragmentation and offering a predictable dispute-resolution framework for intra-African projects.
The practical difference between success and failure is rarely the physics of the resource — it is whether countries can create the single legal and commercial frame that lenders and insurers will underwrite. Harmonisation is not about erasing national sovereignty; it is about using targeted, practical tools to turn dispersed resources and fragmented markets into bankable, regional assets.
How should local content policies be designed to maximise domestic value creation without discouraging investment? What best practices exist for technology development, local manufacturing, and supply chain development in the oil and gas sector within Africa?
Investors underwrite credible cash flows, not political promises. If governments treat local content as an industrial-investment project, they convert a compliance burden into a productivity gain and turn part of the capex bill into durable domestic capacity. If they treat it as opaque rent-capture, they raise capex, delay FID and invite fronting. The working prescription is simple to state, yet complicated to make a reality: publish realistic, category-level baselines before tender; underwrite the first wave of supplier capex with a Supplier Development Fund and first-loss DFI support; phase obligations so the state buys capability before it claims it; require concrete technology-transfer plans and apprenticeship targets at the bid stage; and lock a modest, time-limited fraction of payments in escrow until independent verification clears local-content milestones.
Examples across the continent illustrate both sides of this ledger: Nigeria’s local-content architecture (NCDMB and the NOGICD Act) created a durable domestic service sector by combining legal obligations with supplier registries and certification
In what ways can policymakers ensure energy equity and affordable access for underserved or rural populations, while maintaining the financial viability of utilities and avoiding excessive subsidy burdens?
Energy equity is not charity; it is a political and economic necessity. Utilities that cannot collect revenue do not maintain networks or contract for power. The solution should be targeted, not universal. Lifeline tariffs for small consumption blocks, digital cash transfers for the poorest, smart meters and prepaid systems to stop theft and non-technical losses, and blended finance windows for rural electrification are ways to achieve both connection and sustainable utilities. Kenya’s Last Mile Connectivity programme demonstrates how targeted connection subsidies can rapidly scale access; the alternative, blanket tariff freezes, discourages investment and causes networks to deteriorate. Protection should be given to the poorest in a transparent, time-limited, and funded manner, ensuring utilities survive to provide power to everyone else.
What policy mechanisms are effective for integrating off-grid, mini-grid, or decentralised renewable energy into national energy plans and regulatory structures?
As Africans, we must sequence hydrocarbons first. Gas and oil projects are the only instruments capable of creating the high-density, contractable demand that makes industrialisation and large-scale electrification truly bankable. Decentralised renewables, off-grid and mini-grid systems should be treated not as competitors but as tactical complements, extending access at the last mile where grid corridors will not reach.
Mini-grids can play this role effectively when licensed under clear, light-touch regimes with pre-agreed interconnection and conversion terms. Hybrid architectures should be explicitly permitted, allowing solar or storage to pair with small gas gensets or virtual-pipeline supply in areas where seasonality or reliability requires it. Evidence already exists: Ghana’s Takoradi port cluster demonstrates how port-adjacent fabrication yards can capture spool and module work locally. Rwanda’s streamlined licensing regime and Nigeria’s new mini-grid framework both show that regulatory clarity is the single most powerful lever for unlocking private investment.
What policies or regulatory tools are needed to manage and mitigate the environmental and social risks associated with energy development (e.g. land rights, water usage, emissions, community consultation & benefit sharing)?
Effective environmental and social risk management in Africa’s energy sector must begin with clarity. The issue is not the absence of safeguards but the absence of predictable, enforceable, and well-sequenced tools. Too often, projects stall not because land, water, or emissions are neglected, but because rules are vague, duplicated across agencies, or reinterpreted midstream. The real priority is not creating more regulatory tools but creating better regulation tools, streamlined, standardised, and credibly enforced, so that investor confidence is aligned with legitimacy.
On emissions, the right policy is not to copy European-style carbon pricing, which is neither viable nor fair given Africa’s current realities. Instead, the focus should be on streamlining investment into projects that are bankable, scalable, and capable of sustaining reliable energy access. Africa’s energy industry is only beginning to build momentum; now is the time to support it, not stifle it with premature restrictions.
Community consultation is another critical area where clarity must prevail. Disputes should be settled within the system before they escalate into costly legal battles. A dedicated mediation mechanism with binding timelines would safeguard both investor certainty and community voice. Ultimately, Africa’s task is not to replicate imported blueprints but to craft regulatory tools that reflect its own realities: secure land rights, basin-level environmental assessments, enforceable water-use and emissions standards, and community benefit frameworks that are automatic rather than discretionary. Only then can Africa expand energy access alongside maintaining legitimacy and pace.
How can governments design transition plans and regulatory roadmaps that align climate targets with the immediate energy needs of citizens, especially in countries with high energy poverty, while mobilising investment in both fossil and clean energy sources?
Africa does not have the luxury of adhering to a one-size-fits-all timetable for decarbonisation. The political reality is clear: most citizens do not simply want but urgently need reliable power, jobs, and affordable transport today. The pressing demand is for access, not abstractions.
At the same time, many international companies and investors show greater enthusiasm for clean-energy projects. Yet these initiatives typically require advanced technologies, higher upfront capital, and longer development horizons. They may stall, get frozen mid-stream, or fail to reach final delivery. This dynamic corrodes Africa’s image as a bankable investment destination, while households and businesses remain in the dark. The mismatch between aspiration and reality is stark.
That is why immediate energy security must come first, even if it means prioritising traditional fuels. Investment in hydrocarbons, particularly gas, is not an indulgence but a necessity to stabilise grids, power industries, and create fiscal space. Only once Africa’s surging demand is met at scale can the continent realistically begin to phase in a broader transition strategy. And by then, the global and regional context may look very different, requiring plans that are flexible rather than imposed.
