For centuries, Africa has been the spine upon which the world has stood, yet never the head that guides its course. Lands, rich beyond measure, have fed the engines of empire- fuelling the Industrial Revolution with slave labour and stolen resources, powering the tech boom with Congolese cobalt, mined by the hands of children who have never held smartphones, and now, as the world races toward a clean energy future, our continent is once again poised to be plundered for its lithium, nickel, copper, cobalt and cheap labour. 

The wealth of nations has been carved from African soil, just as the plantation overseer once carved his oppression into African skin. Scars that have never been allowed to heal and gaping wounds kept open, deepened by the relentless destruction of our environment and communities, and by the ever more brutal cuts of economic subjugation that lock our people in cycles of poverty and deliberate underdevelopment. The people of this continent have built human progress and advancement with rough hands, brick by brick, yet rarely for our own homes, futures, or liberation.

We stand at the threshold of yet another chapter where Africa is relegated to the periphery- where the transition to clean energy is not about justice nor collective development, but about ensuring that the colonial core continues to thrive at our expense. If history has taught us anything, it is that without resistance, this transition will mirror every other major turn of recent world history: Africa will be drained, its resources extracted for the benefit of others, while its people remain in the dark.

But within this crisis of climate collapse lies an opportunity- not just for clean energy, but for real, systemic transformation. To seize this opportunity, we must insist that the transition cannot simply be about replacing coal with solar or oil with wind, it must be about smashing the very political and economic systems that have kept us in subjugation for generations. It must be about reclaiming power, ensuring that energy is not just clean, but as a fundamental right in the 21st century, its production and consumption should be articulated as a tool for liberation. This is the fight of our time, and it is why we must REpower Afrika.

The global climate crisis, at its root, is not simply a crisis of carbon emissions but a crisis of capitalism, neocolonial extraction, and economic subjugation. 

The promise of a clean energy transition is not guaranteed for the periphery of global capitalism, it is only secured for the colonial core. As in the era of direct colonial subjugation, the purpose of the periphery remains the same: to serve the development, well-being, military prowess and profit margins of imperial powers and the corporate enterprises of empire.

Today, we see this reality unfolding with disturbing clarity. Postcolonial Africa has remained largely trapped in a neoliberal development model that not only depletes natural resources at an unsustainable rate but also deepens the inequalities rooted in colonial exploitation. By prioritising foreign investment and market liberalisation over domestic sovereignty and public ownership, the neoliberal trajectory ensures that Africa’s wealth continues to flow outward, leaving our people with little more than environmental destruction and economic precarity. The persistence of debt dependency and the privatisation of essential industries further entrench these disparities, keeping true development out of reach for the majority of our people.

The false promise of a clean energy transition in Africa is perhaps best illuminated by how imperial powers and their corporate organs continue their scramble for African fossil fuels, relentlessly pursuing projects like the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) in Uganda and Tanzania or the Cabo del Gado LNG projects in Mozambique. In parallel, we continue to witness the bloody destabilisation of countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where imperial powers exploit and maintain community tensions, using their puppets to ensure that critical minerals are extracted cheaply to supply global manufacturing plants producing clean energy and tech infrastructure for the near-exclusive benefit of the colonial core. These pursuits and arrangements are telling examples of the empire’s violent will to keep the wheels of its industrial economies turning and its arsenals of death machinery fully stocked. The social, environmental and economic costs of these arrangements, as always, are borne by the African people- weighted squarely on the shoulders of the Wretched of the Earth.

Even highly touted clean energy initiatives such as the World Bank’s recent Mission 300, cannot be justified as developmental pursuits. Mission 300, which sets itself the task of delivering energy to 300 of the estimated 600 million Africans lacking access, will drive our continent deeper into the suffocating grip of debt. Many African nations are already buckling under unsustainable debt burdens, their fiscal space choked, leaving them unable to invest in critical infrastructure and public services. Rather than providing a real pathway to energy sovereignty and widespread public energy access, Mission 300’s financing model, built on a toxic mix of loans and private investments, threatens to drag the continent further into financial servitude.

Debt-financed renewable energy projects do not serve the continent nor its people; they serve the profiteers. While private investors extract guaranteed returns, governments and taxpayers are left carrying the financial risk, sinking deeper into a cycle where development is always promised but never realised. This is not just economic mismanagement, it is a calculated mechanism of control. Debt forces African nations to gut social spending, sell off raw materials at humiliatingly low prices, allow multi-national corporations to expand major fossil fuel developments, and throw open their markets to exploitation, ensuring that wealth continues to be siphoned away to the very forces that have plundered the continent for centuries. Mission 300 does not represent a break from the past, it is its continuation, repackaged in green rhetoric but reeking of the same old imperialist playbook.

The neoliberal agenda is relentless in its quest to mark itself as the standard, if not the pinnacle, of economic and political ideology. 

The January 2025 issue of The Economist for example, calls for a “capitalist revolution” in Africa, championing policies that would deepen corporate control and further entrench private monopoly ownership over our resources and industry. Meanwhile, in a new February 2025 report from the World Bank has blamed South Africa’s slow economic growth on labour laws which regulate exploitation and on social protection mechanisms which cater to the most basic needs of the devastatingly poor, reinforcing the idea that the wellbeing of poor black people in Africa must be sacrificed to satisfy the interests of global capital. 

This sort of racist ideological onslaught seeks to justify, uphold & entrench policies of colonial maintenance and further confirms that the exploitation of Africa is not a relic of the past but an ongoing reality and thriving strategy, rooted in the very logic of global capitalism, which ensures that Africa remains a site of extraction rather than development. It is an age-old approach to the continent which has been violently imposed through the colonial era, sinisterly upheld through structural readjustment at the dawn of liberation and insisted upon today by the crushing fist of the global capitalist class who weaponise their finance capital and their monopolies against any who dare to chart a different course.

It is against this backdrop that we must recognise that our fight for climate justice cannot be crudely reduced to a simple demand for a transition to renewables. It must be a decolonial struggle- a struggle for resource and energy sovereignty that places power firmly in the hands of workers and communities. It is in this spirit that we call on the African climate justice movement to engage and adopt the logic of REpower Afrika and hold its banner high.

REpower Afrika is not just a campaign for renewable energy; it is a campaign for energy democracy, decolonisation, and systemic transformation. 

We refuse to allow the transition to renewables to become another chapter in Africa’s long history of exploitation, where clean energy infrastructure is built for the benefit of imperial powers while our people remain locked out of access to electricity, economic sovereignty, and political control over our resources and destinies.

The Vision of REpower Afrika

• REpower Afrika envisions a continent where energy democracy is a reality, where millions of people currently without access to energy are empowered through socially owned, decentralised renewable energy (DRE). It is a vision of an Africa where energy is not a commodity for profit but a fundamental right, enabling communities to realise substantive freedoms- including quality healthcare, education, adequate nutrition, dignified employment, secure housing, and a safe and sustainable environment.
• We see REpower Afrika as a fighting banner- held high by ordinary people transformed into climate justice warriors, leading the charge against the entrenched systems of exploitation that have kept the continent in energy poverty. This campaign is not simply about renewables- it is about real systemic change, breaking down the barriers imposed by corporate greed, colonial-era economic structures, and suffocating state and financial interests that prevent the widespread implementation of socially owned DRE.
• REpower Afrika is a campaign to build a powerful, organised movement capable of reshaping the continent’s energy landscape. We recognise that the climate crisis is not just an environmental crisis- it is a crisis of injustice, and we aim to turn it into an opportunity to materially transform the lives of millions. Through collective action, we will root this movement in solidarity and the unyielding pursuit of justice, ensuring that those most affected by climate collapse are at the forefront of shaping solutions that serve them- not corporations, fossil fuel interests, or profit-driven investors.

 

Our central demand is clear: social ownership over the renewable energy means of production, under the democratic control of workers and local communities. 

Human potential is not static- it evolves through collective experience, shaped by the social conditions in which people live and struggle. This is the essence of Praxis. As Freire puts it; “Trite as it seems …man is the only …[animal] to treat not only his actions but his very self as the object of his reflection; this capacity distinguishes him from the animals who are unable to separate themselves from their activity”. As individuals engage in the processes of production, governance, and shared decision-making, their awareness deepens, their aspirations expand, and new possibilities emerge that cannot be realised in isolation. This is why true development cannot be dictated from above by private interests or distant policymakers- it must be rooted in the participatory transformation of society itself.

REpower Afrika’s vision of energy ownership recognises that people’s needs and aspirations are not fixed but continually shaped by their material conditions. If development is to serve the people, then society must be structured in a way that allows them to direct and redefine it in response to their evolving realities. Thus, social ownership over the renewable energy means of production is not just a policy choice- it is the only viable framework for ensuring that energy systems are democratically controlled, adaptable to changing needs, and designed to empower communities rather than enrich private investors.

Unlike corporate-controlled renewables, which entrench wealth in the hands of a few, socially owned energy systems are dynamic, reflecting the shifting needs, knowledge, and creative potential of the people who build, maintain, and rely on them. It is not a rigid blueprint but a continuous process, one that prioritises collective empowerment and ensures that the transition to clean energy is not only technological but deeply political, serving the long-term liberation of society rather than reproducing structures of control.

Not only is this necessary, but it is also entirely viable. Throughout history, both pre- and post-colonial societies have demonstrated that public and collective ownership and control of resources and industry leads to greater access to education, healthcare, housing, food security and other substantive freedoms. 

Several noteworthy contemporary social ownership models further emphasise this point. Community Share Ownership Trusts (CSOTs) in Zimbabwe for example, have been established to ensure that local communities directly benefit from the exploitation and extraction of natural resources in their areas. Notably, the Gwanda Community Share Ownership Trust has utilised funds from mining revenues to implement key developmental projects, including the construction of schools and clinics, and the drilling of boreholes. These initiatives have led to improved access to education, healthcare, and clean water. Similarly, in Tshakhuma, South Africa, residents have developed collectively owned, gravity-fed piped water schemes. These self-supply systems emerged as a response to inadequate public and private service delivery, showcasing the community’s willingness and ability to engage in service provision. While operating without legal recognition, these schemes have provided essential water services to many households, enhancing public health.

These initiatives and others like them, while imperfect, still further the idea that when communities and workers directly own and manage vital infrastructure, development becomes more equitable and adaptable to the needs and interests of ordinary people, reinforcing healthcare, education, employment, and basic services as rights rather than costly privileges. We must then assert that when renewable energy is socially-owned and treated as a public good, rather than a commodity for private profit, the entire economic and social structure will shift to measure development itself by way of people’s access to substantive freedoms.

If we are to win this struggle, or at least further it in our lifetimes, we must reorient our collective efforts toward two primary tasks: consciousness-building and building organisation. 

The experience of Ujamaa in Tanzania offers valuable lessons for today’s struggles for social ownership, particularly the necessity of deep political organisation and consciousness raising. While Ujamaa, particularly Ujamaa Vijijini, sought to establish a socialist mode of production through collectivised villages, it ultimately faltered because the masses of ordinary people tasked with implementing it had not been adequately organised or politically prepared to lead the process themselves (this amid other dynamics and shortfalls). Instead of emerging from mass participation in a protracted struggle which would have set the foundations for a robust democratic people’s revolution, Ujamaa was introduced as state policy. Without the necessary level of political education and mass organisation, many communities saw it as an externally imposed directive rather than a project they owned and shaped. 

In the fight for socially owned decentralised renewable energy (DRE), we cannot afford to repeat this mistake. We must first build the ground, fertilising it through mass education and deep organising, ensuring that ordinary people are not just mobilised to demand socially owned DRE, but are politically equipped to justify those demands, secure them and subsequently implement, manage, and defend the people’s energy means of production. True social ownership is not simply about securing public control over infrastructure- it is about ensuring that the people themselves have the consciousness, organisation, and power to wield that control effectively and further its grasp over society at large.

This is the foundation upon which any real movement for climate justice in Africa must be built. We cannot afford to remain locked in the narrow framework of typical NGO-style advocacy that, while valuable in some respects, has failed to build the level of mass mobilisation required to challenge entrenched systems of power.

We must reject the illusion that Africa’s transition to clean energy will be handed to us by benevolent governments, development banks, international investors or the supposed “good-will” of profiteers, and we must never sow those illusions in the minds of our people.

Our assertion is that the only path to true energy sovereignty is through mass political education, deep organising, and the mobilisation of workers, youth and communities into a force capable of demanding, securing and subsequently, managing, defending and advancing, socially owned renewable energy and eco-economies. Necessarily then, our work requires a sharp break from its prioritisation of COPs, multilateral conferences, boardroom negotiations and hotel conferences. Of course, these activities have their place and their strategic bearing should be reviewed and negotiated regularly across the movement, but they should never be approached as fundamental priorities. 

The role of climate justice NGOs is not NGO-typical advocacy, it is the provision of support for professional revolutionary activity.

While the REpower Afrika campaign is currently being spearheaded by 350Africa.org- Africa’s branch of 350.org, a larger international-NGO- it is our self-critique, as potential revolutionaries turned salaried NGO activists, and our recognition of our organisation’s structural limitations as an NGO, dependent for survival on the very system we oppose, that affirms the role that NGOs could and should play in the movement. Paradoxically, NGOs like ours must reject the NGO-isation of struggle and instead, must provide support, resources and infrastructure to aid the development of real forces of popular struggle, recognising that real change will be won and furthered through the collective effort of all our people.

Ultimately, it is our willingness and our ability to support the organisation of the masses of ordinary people into structures of professional revolutionary activity that will mark a qualitative shift in our struggle against exploitation, extraction and destruction, while driving forward our fight for energy democracy and economic sovereignty. In the ever applicable words of Lenin; “The fact that the masses are spontaneously being drawn into the movement does not make the organisation of this struggle less necessary. On the contrary, it makes it more necessary.” 

The task before us is immense, but it is clear: we must build a mass movement that, above all else, is rooted in education, organisation, and direct action. 

REpower Afrika could be our rallying cry- a campaign that unites our struggle for climate justice with our broader struggles for decolonisation, economic sovereignty, and genuine people’s power. Our work must embody a bold refusal to allow the transition to be co-opted by the same forces that have plundered our continent for centuries and must resolutely affirm our belief in the ability, capacity and willingness of all our people to tap into our collective imagination and capacity to envision, fight for and govern a fundamentally better world. 

We do not ask for change- we demand it. And through the power of the people, we will build it.

Zaki Mamdoo,
Interim Africa Regional Campaigner at 350africa.org and coordinator of the StopEACOP Campaign & Coalition