Programme Director, Excellencies, Ministers and Deputy Ministers from across our great continent, Leaders of business, finance and industry, Heads of power pools, utilities and regulatory authorities, Distinguished delegates, Ladies and Gentlemen,
We assemble here at a moment of profound historical consequence.
The global order, as we have known it for decades, is not merely evolving; it is being recalibrated in real time. The energy system that fuelled successive industrial revolutions is undergoing structural transformation. Supply chains are being reorganised under the pressure of strategic rivalry. Industrial policy has returned as a central instrument of statecraft, with major economies deploying unprecedented subsidy regimes to secure supply chains, protect domestic manufacturing and reposition themselves within emerging clean technology value chains.
Capital is flowing not only in pursuit of yield, but increasingly in search of resilience, security and geopolitical advantage.
Energy now sits at the epicentre of this global reordering.
It is no longer simply a commodity traded across borders, nor merely infrastructure underpinning economic activity. Energy has become sovereignty expressed in electrons, competitiveness translated into megawatts and national ambition wired into grids, pipelines and interconnectors. In our time, energy functions simultaneously as a tool of diplomacy, a lever of trade and, when circumstances demand, a weapon of geopolitical influence.
Energy corridors shape alliances. Strategic reserves influence negotiation tables. Export controls and critical minerals policies redefine industrial futures. Industrial subsidy frameworks in advanced economies are redrawing global manufacturing maps. Supply disruptions alter diplomatic posture and recalibrate economic relationships. We have witnessed how access to gas has reshaped alliances across continents and how control over processing capacity for critical minerals has become central to geopolitical strategy.
Energy has become the silent architecture of global power.
In this reconfigured world, Africa is not a peripheral actor. Africa is a structural anchor in the global transition.
Without African platinum group metals, the hydrogen economy cannot achieve scale. Without African cobalt, manganese and copper, the battery revolution falters. Without African vanadium, long duration storage remains constrained. Without African uranium, the renewed global interest in nuclear energy cannot advance at pace.
The transition to net zero is materially dependent on Africa.
This structural reality places our continent at the centre of one of the most consequential economic transformations of our time. Yet history urges vigilance. Structural centrality does not automatically yield structural prosperity. For generations, Africa supplied the raw materials of industrial revolutions elsewhere, while value addition remained beyond our shores. We exported resources and imported finished goods. We bore environmental costs and absorbed volatility while others consolidated industrial advantage.
Today, as industrial policy once again shapes global competition, Africa must define its own trajectory within this reconfiguration. We must ensure that the global transition does not replicate historical asymmetries under a new technological banner.
It is therefore fitting that we gather at the Africa Energy Indaba at such a pivotal moment. This platform represents more than an annual convening. It must continue to evolve into the principal continental forum where policy coherence, regulatory alignment and capital mobilisation intersect.
Africa’s energy transformation cannot be advanced through fragmented engagement. It requires coordination across power pools, harmonisation of regulatory frameworks, credible project preparation pipelines and sustained dialogue between sovereign actors and institutional capital. The Africa Energy Indaba provides a structured space where such alignment can take place at scale.
It must increasingly serve as a catalyst for transaction, not only discussion. A venue where integrated resource plans meet development finance institutions, where transmission expansion strategies meet infrastructure funds, where cross border interconnectors are conceptualised not merely as engineering assets but as instruments of economic integration.
As the African Continental Free Trade Area deepens intra African trade, energy integration becomes the enabling infrastructure of industrial corridors. Manufacturing clusters, mineral processing zones, hydrogen hubs and digital economies require reliable, affordable and regionally integrated electricity systems. Energy planning and trade integration must therefore move in concert.
Africa’s mineral wealth places us at the centre of the global transition, yet minerals alone do not constitute transformation. Beneficiation is not rhetoric; it is system design. A battery precursor facility cannot operate on intermittent supply. Green steel production depends on stable hydrogen and firm baseload capacity. Electrolysers require grid resilience and advanced manufacturing demands quality, predictability and scale.
Industrial transformation rests on the reliability, affordability and depth of our electricity systems.
Minerals without energy do not become industry; industry without transmission does not become exports; exports without infrastructure do not become prosperity.
If we are to move from quarry to factory, from pit to product, electricity becomes the decisive variable. Industrialising the minerals value chain requires industrialising the energy value chain itself. We must develop manufacturing capacity in transformers, conductors, cables, renewable components and storage systems. We must invest in local engineering capabilities, technical training institutions and research partnerships that embed technological competence within our economies.
Energy infrastructure development must therefore be seen not only as capital expenditure, but as industrial policy in action. Each transmission line built, each substation expanded and each renewable facility commissioned should reinforce domestic capacity, skills transfer and enterprise development.
Energy justice in this decade must be understood not as a slogan but as a doctrine grounded in development.
It is about access, because more than 600 million Africans remain without electricity, and about clean cooking because millions of households continue to endure daily indignity and health risk. It is also about agency, about the sovereign right to determine our own energy pathways and to finance them at rates that reflect performance rather than prejudice.
Energy justice is therefore inseparable from continental integration. It requires that we think beyond national grids and consider the architecture of a connected African power system, capable of unlocking scale, reducing volatility and enabling industrial corridors across borders.
Kwame Nkrumah reminded us that “the independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa.” In our time, that insight carries a new dimension. No African nation’s energy security is complete unless it is linked to the integration, stability and industrial prosperity of the continent as a whole. Fragmented systems constrain opportunity. Integrated systems multiply it.
Energy justice, therefore, is continental integration made operational.
Africa continues to face a disproportionate premium in global capital markets. The gap between perceived risk and real performance remains wide. Empirical evidence demonstrates that many African infrastructure assets perform reliably over long horizons, yet they are priced at risk premiums that assume instability rather than resilience.
In certain instances, perceived African risk has itself become highly profitable. Financial structures designed to hedge and price African exposure generate returns that exceed the actual volatility of the underlying assets. Risk pricing becomes an extractive layer imposed before infrastructure is even commissioned.
The burden ultimately falls on citizens and industries through elevated tariffs, constrained competitiveness and delayed industrial development. The cost of capital determines the cost of power, and the cost of power shapes the trajectory of economic transformation.
If Africa is expected to decarbonise while industrialising, then the global financing architecture must evolve to reflect data rather than perception and performance rather than inherited bias. Capital allocation must recognise that long-term infrastructure investment in Africa is not speculative terrain, but foundational development.
Across our continent, renewable ambition is rising. Yet generation pipelines frequently encounter a structural bottleneck in grid capacity. Transmission has therefore emerged as both the defining constraint and the defining opportunity of the transition. Transmission lines shape economic geography, determine industrial clustering, enable cross border trade and underpin the stability of interconnected power pools.
In South Africa, prolonged load shedding exposed the structural importance of system design. That recognition led to the implementation of Independent Transmission Projects, through which we retain public planning authority while mobilising private capital under transparent and disciplined frameworks designed to accelerate grid expansion while safeguarding public interest.
Energy security is not accidental; it is designed. South Africa’s Integrated Resource Plan 2025 represents a R2.3 trillion investment roadmap for our electricity future. It projects more than 105 GW of new capacity by 2039, expands renewables at scale, introduces 6 GW of gas capacity by 2030 to stabilise the system, scales storage, incorporates nuclear and integrates transmission expansion as a core lever of reliability.
Forward planning reduces uncertainty, strengthens investor confidence and provides the institutional clarity required for large scale capital mobilisation. In a world defined by geopolitical turbulence, credible planning becomes strategic advantage.
Africa possesses unparalleled renewable potential, critical mineral wealth and a demographic dividend that positions it uniquely within the global energy transition. If aligned with integration, disciplined planning and fair financing, our continent can emerge not only as a supplier of materials, but as a producer of clean technologies, a centre of green industrialisation and a continent that defines its own developmental trajectory.
If energy is diplomacy, Africa must negotiate from strength. If energy is trade leverage, Africa must secure and deepen its value chains. If energy can constrain minerals transformation, Africa must design systems that make it a catalyst rather than a constraint.
If minerals are the inheritance of our geology, electricity is the instrument through which we convert that inheritance into enduring industrial strength. If infrastructure is the architecture of sovereignty, transmission lines are the arteries of the African century.
Let this Indaba serve as a platform where ambition is translated into execution, where continental priorities are structured into bankable pipelines and where Africa’s energy future is shaped with clarity and confidence.
The African century will not be proclaimed; it will be constructed through planning, financed through discipline, wired through transmission, industrialised through policy and secured through unity.
And it will be powered by us.
I thank you.