Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni accused Europe of “brazen double standards” towards Africa in its climate and energy policies.
President Museveni tweeted, “News from Europe that a vast wind farm is being demolished to make way for a new open-pit mine is the reprehensible we in Africa have come to expect. It makes a mockery of western commitment to climate change”.
“For some years we have been told fossil investment in Africa for Africans is unacceptable. Now with Europe reinvesting in its own fossil fuel power industry. This is the purest hypocrisy. It makes a mockery of Western commitments to climate targets.
We will not expect one rule for them and another rule for us, it’s morally bankrupt for Europeans to expect to take Africa’s fossil fuels for their own energy production but refuse to countenance African use of those same fossils for theirs.
If Africa was to increase energy production just by using her known reserves of natural gas, the continent’s share of global emissions would rise from 3 per cent to just 3.5 per cent.
Instead, Western money has poured wind and solar projects that received applause from the virtuous in the corridors of congress and chancelleries of Europe-but leave Africans without electricity when the wind does not blow, and the sun doesn’t shine.
$25 billion was spent in six months this year on Western arms to the Ukraine conflict-would, according to IEA estimates, rise out of energy poverty by 2030 through such diversification.
If Europe does not help, we will get there through our own endeavours and with the support of those willing who do not sermonize.
Europe’s failure to meet its climate goals should not be Africa’s problem”. Museveni wrote in a published blog that coincided with the UN’s COP27 climate summit taking place in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-sheikh.
Earlier this year, France’s TotalEnergies and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation signed a $10-billion agreement to develop Ugandan oilfields and ship the Ugandan crude oil through a 1,445-kilometer (900-mile) pipeline to a Tanzanian port on the Indian Ocean.
The project has run into strong opposition from activists and Environmental groups that say it threatens the region’s fragile ecosystem and the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people.
