By Moses Patience Chat
The Executive Chairman of African Energy Chamber (AEC), NJ Ayuk, has said that Africa as a continent needs free markets and participation of private the sector in order to experience significant development in the downstream market segment of the energy industry.
Ayuk said this during his presentation at this year’s edition of the African Refiners and Distributors Association (ARDA) Conference, which commenced on Monday, March 13 and will run through Friday, March 17 in Cape Town, South Africa.
Speaking in a panel discussion, titled “OPEC-Africa Energy Dialogue Post-COP27: Ensuring a Coordinated, Robust Intra-African Oil & Gas Industry Alongside Implementation of Energy Transition Aspirations,” Ayuk maintained that the energy industry needs to focus on bringing solutions that will enable expansion of the sector.
According to him, “we as Africans and the industry need to be more solution driven. We need to create an enabling environment and look at what are we doing wrong to change things.
“If renewables were the solution, South Africa would not be in darkness. Germany would not be importing coal from South Africa. We cannot be told that renewables are the way to go when we are receiving less than 2% of the global investments.
“We need to talk about how we can achieve intra-African free trade to boost energy access and ensure clean cooking. We don’t need to be ashamed of making money, because when we make money, we will be able to define our own energy road plan and fix the energy crisis.”
The AEC Boss also stated that Africa needs to encourage signing of deals and stop resource nationalization to help expand the continent’s energy industry.
His words: “We need to look at fiscals and how we can continue attracting firms. When we cut the bottlenecks currently restricting industry expansion, firms will start to come in.
“Africa should prioritize the use of African solutions, action and opportunities, while governments must cut down taxes, they are too high.”