Although the oil and natural gas industry is often painted as greedy, it has the potential to create immense good for the world’s most disadvantaged people — as long as leaders adhere to a few moral principles, according to NJ Ayuk, executive chairman of the African Energy Chamber.
Speaking before a crowd of students at the 9th Annual Cambridge Africa Together Conference at the prestige Jesus College, University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, Ayuk explained how he planned to fight for social justice throughout his legal career, but the promise of expanded electricity to his home continent, where some 600 million people lack access to electricity, moved him to get involved with the industry.
“The energy sector is going to be the most amazing sector. It is going to change Africa. Energy is life. Energy is power. Energy is everything,” he said. “If a crazy human rights activist like me can be doing energy today, I’ll say it this way: Those making energy decisions are not the chosen geologists or energy scientists. Whether it is renewables, whether it is oil or natural gas, we need you to get involved, whether on the policy side, whether on the finance side, whether on the engineering side. It’s really important.”
As the bestselling author, most recently of the prescriptive A Just Transition: Making Energy Poverty History With an Energy Mix, NJ Ayuk uses his position and influence to urge other countries to invest in Africa’s energy infrastructure. A lawyer by training, Ayuk was born in Cameroon and studied the law in the United States, where he found inspiration and mentorship from Black Americans who spearheaded the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
NJ Ayuk: ‘For Africa, Gas Is Not Green’
One of Ayuk’s predominant themes is the mistreatment that Africa has repeatedly suffered as the result of one-sided energy deals. Too many times, the continent’s natural resources have been mined to benefit Western countries while leaving Africans poor and starving.
Now, as the world confronts the realities of climate change and the need for more sustainable forms of energy, many of the countries that continue to rely on greenhouse gases have asked Africa to keep its oil and natural gas resources unused.
He explained to the rapt student audience that two months after all the pledges that came out of the Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Glasgow, “Norway gave out 52 new oil and gas licenses. The United Kingdom opened their first coal mines in 30 years. They opened the North Sea up for drilling. Germany opened coal mines. The U.S. opened federal lands for drilling. But they told everybody in Africa to do nothing,” NJ Ayuk said. “‘You have to leave it in the ground.’ They consulted a witch doctor who told him that natural gas is green and we can finance it for Europe, but African gas is not green, so we cannot finance it, and we must leave it in the ground.”
He argued instead for fairer rules, pointing out that Western countries should be required to transition away from nonrenewable sources of energy sooner than African countries, which have contributed less than 3% of total greenhouse gases.
“I think this kind of treatment of poor people is not something that we need to accept,” he said during his fireside chat in Cambridge. “I say this as somebody who has a good life. I don’t need to do this, but I think your generation and everybody here, you need to be able to stand up for something and have a principle. We need to be able to really address these issues, and even in the polarized world, but be able to say that we need some fairness here. South Africa, Africa’s most industrialized country, lives with eight to 10 hours a day in the dark. They call it load shedding, the Nigerians call it blackouts. It happens all over.”
Students Can Use Idealism To Push for Equity, Says NJ Ayuk
To combat energy poverty, NJ Ayuk urged students to use their idealism to push for fairer treatment of Africans in the energy sector. Not only is it the right thing to do for the continent and the world, he said, it’s also a lucrative field.
“There’s going to be a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of money. Think about it,” he said. “To get to net zero, you’re going to spend about $80 trillion to $100 trillion to get there. That’s a lot of money for you guys to miss out on, thinking that you don’t want to be part of that. It’s going to affect you anyway. We don’t have the luxury to say ‘You have to be only in oil or gas.’ Heck, I want to see more Africans involved in the renewable energy space.”
NJ Ayuk shared, “One of my greatest heroes in history is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He talked about the arc of a moral universe. It is long and it bends toward justice. But surely it doesn’t bend by itself. It’s everyday people that get up, that move it, that shake it, whether left or right, and you keep shaking it.
“You keep shaking it and you make it bend toward justice because you are going to be that greatest generation and you are really going to change the world. As a 43-year-old, I still believe I can change the world and I’m not giving up hope.”