Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe has said Africa must invest to overturn the energy deficit in many countries.
He was addressing the Africa Energy Summit on the sidelines of the World Energy Forum.
Mugabe underscored the right of nations to pursue peaceful nuclear options for power generation.
He said it was disheartening to note that Africa was “a case of energy underdevelopment and energy under-consumption”.
“My own country, Zimbabwe, sits on huge coal deposits we cannot harness. We also sit on significant deposits of methane gas which remain unexploited.
“The billion-strong African continent accounts for a mere 3 percent of global power consumption,” said Mugabe.
“Per capita electricity consumption in Africa, we are told, is about 60kWh compared to 8 000kWh in the United States of America.
He said Inga Dam in the Democratic Republic of Congo could easily light up the whole continent if fully developed.
“I am raising issues of creating a good, progressive energy policy environment on the continent which ensures we invest in our energy sector while we value-add on that same resource for greater energy access to our people and for greater export value to our economies,” he said.
Africa’s marginalisation in the global economy, he said, replicated itself as the continent’s marginalisation on the energy front.
“We are exporters of primary energy commodity, which is why pipelines and ships daily cart crude from the continent for refinement elsewhere in the developed world before the same commodity comes back to us as huge fossil energy bill; which we can hardly afford.
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