In the same week known climate denialist and convicted felon Donald Trump was re-elected to the White House, Africa Energy Week took place in Cape Town. Both spin lies, half-truths, and hypocrisy, claiming the benefits of fossil fuels for the poor, a sovereign state, and the key to self-determined development.

The argument against oil and gas due to their carbon emissions and resulting extreme weather across the continent has been regularly made and is now playing out materially in the form of droughts and floods that have wiped out 80 percent of Zimbabwe’s harvest and affected hundreds of thousands in Sudan respectively. However, what is missing is a rebuttal to the industry’s co-option of liberatory language and sustainable development critiques. Co-option is not unique to the African continent. As cases from Brazil show, the appropriation of sovereignty discourse by oil and gas companies never leads to equal benefits and, instead, continues to defend private (and mostly Western) interests.

Africa Energy Week, hosted by the Africa Energy Chamber, was a congregation in the supposed search for solutions to Africa’s energy crises. However, with the number of fossil fuel corporations, speakers from the African Petroleum Producers Organisation (APPO) and Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and the number of energy ministers from across the continent, it was clearly a gathering on how to hook the continent on the false promises of oil and gas as transition fuels and argue that the environmental goals of the Global North were standing in the way of Africa’s development.

In his opening address, NJ Ayuk, the Executive Chairman of the African Energy Chamber and a convicted fraudster in the US, remarked on the importance of oil and gas for job creation and the continent’s right to energy sovereignty and economic growth. Disguised in the language of hope for Africa’s liberation and development is a new form of climate denial that appropriates progressive rhetoric in service of fossil fuel companies.

Researcher and activist Dr Alex Lenferna details in a recent publication how the appropriation of progressive causes, such as racial justice, decolonization, and anti-imperialism, was used as propaganda by Shell and  Gwede Mantashe, South Africa’s Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy, to attack critiques and local opponents to Shell’s seismic surveys on the west coast of the country.

Although not as explicit as Mantashe calling environmental activism “colonialism and apartheid of a special type,” the language of oil and gas giants and their critique of northern interference is used to enable the extraction of Africa’s resources with minimal protest.

Dr Lenferna classifies this language appropriation as propaganda, specifically arguing that it classifies as undermining demagoguery propaganda. He writes: “Echoing colonizers before them, the neocolonial push for oil and gas extraction comes masked as being good for the people who are trying to resist it.” As the propaganda echoes the colonial narratives of “development,” so too do the extractive practices as the profits and products are shipped offshore.

Calling out this appropriation of language is not a disagreement with the progressive claims themselves. Yes, we need energy. Yes, the continent needs to break from the neo-colonial chains imposed by structural adjustment and other “development” initiatives. But implying that oil and gas, an industry drenched in the colonial practices of extraction, destruction, resource appropriation, violence, and racial capitalism, is the way forward is hypocritical and an insult to those who wish and work for African sovereignty on Africa’s terms.

If the industry was genuine in its message on African sovereignty and liberation perhaps they might read the likes of anti-colonial leader Amilcar Cabral, agreeing with his quote: “we can affirm, without fear of contradiction… that, to defend the Earth is the most efficient process to defend Humankind.” However, this may sit uncomfortably with the ecocidal realities of oil extraction in the Niger Delta or plans to build an oil pipeline through national parks in East Africa.

In a similar fashion to the economic liberation rhetoric, Ayuk also pointed out that Africa should not compromise its development goals to fall in line with wealthier countries’ environmental standards—another tactic to justify fossil fuel expansion on the continent.

Here we are pointed to the valid critiques of sustainable development that highlight the injustices of the climate crisis and its multilateral solutionism, whereby rich countries dictate the playbook while the Global South suffers.

Even sustainable development conferences on the continent, such as the 2023 African Climate Summit, have offered little hope of change from the status quo—brimming with corporate solutions from the global North, including loans and carbon credit schemes, and relegated civil society voices to the background. These financialised solutions rehash histories of carbon colonialism and sideline local communities dealing with crop failures, flooding, pollution, and intense cyclones.

Likewise, we must also be attentive to green colonialism already unfolding in North Africa, where people are being displaced from the land for solar mega projects that serve European energy use and the current prospectors of green hydrogen, continuing relations of extraction and resource appropriation on the continent.

Notwithstanding these notable critiques of profiteering environmental policy, to claim that oil and gas are aligned with the climate justice critiques is a disservice to Global South activists, communities, and researchers who continue to counter climate solutions that perpetuate resource appropriation and skirt the issue of reparations from colonial plunder. Simply put, oil and gas are not part of the deep and radical Just Transition needed to avert climate catastrophe and ensure African prosperity.

The appropriation of Africa’s right to development subverts real concerns and aspirations about what kind of development we want. The case of TotalEnergies gas exploration in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique is a perfect example of the type of “development” the industry wishes to bring. Displacement, radicalization, war, suppression of the press, human rights violations, thousands killed, and a French corporation eventually pulling out of its “development” plans after leaving a region in chaos. This is by no means the radical, African-led, development that the likes of Kwame Nkrumah and others spoke about in their opposition to neocolonial development in the 1960’s and 70s. The “development” of Cabo Delgado, and many other places on the frontlines of extraction, is not the revolution the fossil fuel industry spins it to be.

Africa Energy Week 2024 had the slogan: “Making energy poverty history by 2030.” Energy poverty is a timely issue on the continent, and it needs solutions and infrastructure that ensure sovereignty as well as security. However, we have seen time and time again that fossil fuels are not aligned with such democratic or riotous principles. Betting on oil and gas, predominantly explored and extracted by foreign companies, for African energy sovereignty is like betting on the colonizer’s cannons to sink its ships. This bet is not unique to the continent and there are lessons to be learned from others in the Global South who have made these fairytales a reality.

Brazil’s Petrobras was founded in 1953 and conceived under the “Oil is ours” slogan – a movement focused on resource and financial sovereignty. The oil company was key to the Brazilian industrialization movement and held a monopoly over oil extractivism for a few decades as a state-owned company.

After decades of toe-dipping in international markets, a neoliberal shift turned it into a mixed capital enterprise in the 1990s, pushing Brazil’s oil economy into the murky waters of profit accumulation. Since then, its scope has expanded to oil, natural gas, and petrol derivatives. Truth be told, great efforts were made to maintain petrol economies outside of the hands of Western giants, but within a highly commodified market escaping its claws is a hard task.

Decades after its birth, Petrobras has been the protagonist of corruption scandals, has failed to meet sustainability goals, and kept profit margins high. Between 2014 and 2015, Operation Car Wash became globally known for its uncovering of one of the world’s largest corruption scandals—the accompanying media coverage was later captured by polarized political discourse, pushing community interests and ecological impacts to the background of the conversation once more.

This neoliberal turn was also felt by the national electricity provider, Eletrobras, where the privatization of service providers marked its lack of commitment to community interests. Although the company strives to be known for its role in expanding the Brazilian electricity grid and bringing affordable power to urban and rural areas alike, recent research shows that over 45% of Brazilian households spend at least half of their income to keep the lights on.

Today, Brazil faces climate disasters almost daily, including soaring deforestation rates, destructive wildfires, droughts, and floods. Ongoing developments may worsen this crisis: Petrobrás is currently expanding plans for deep-sea drilling off the Brazilian equatorial coast, closing in on the Amazon river mouth and dozens of indigenous communities who strongly oppose the project. The dangers of deep-sea extractivism are growing in South Africa; both oil and gas licenses continue to be negotiated in the Orange Basin, their ongoing efforts hard to track. Multinationals continue to pull in and out of contracts, while the majority of  South Africans remain out of the loop when it comes to control of the country’s natural resources.

As yet another climate conference begins in the petro-state of Azerbaijan, the lessons from Brazil should be front and center of the Global South delegations displeased with the Global North’s reluctance to pay up for loss and damage while demanding shifts in energy regimes across the South. The fossil fuel industry will continue to spin its “solutions” as anti-imperial and for the people. However, like in Brazil, the industry will never be revolutionary but will forever be tied to a business model that places profit over habitability. We must ask what kind of development we want and need, implementing solutions from and for the continent that improve habitability for all.