Each time oil prices spike in the Gulf, Africa is reminded of an uncomfortable truth: too much of our economic confidence still depends on decisions made far from our shores.
Last week, Brent crude moved back above $100 a barrel after the latest escalation around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, a corridor that handles about a fifth of global oil trade. For Africa, that is not distant geopolitics. It is a direct tax on transport, food, fertiliser, manufacturing and household budgets.
That is why this moment should not push Africa deeper into anxiety. It should push us into clarity. We have spent too long discussing energy security as if it begins and ends with imported petroleum. It does not.
Real energy sovereignty means building systems that are harder to destabilise from abroad. It means drawing power from what this continent already owns in abundance: sun, wind, water, geothermal heat and the mineral base of the next industrial age.
Africa accounts for just 6.0 percent of global energy use and less than 3.0 percent of global energy-related carbon emissions. Yet we are repeatedly among the first to absorb the economic pain of global fuel shocks.
The hopeful story is not that Africa must discover energy, but that it must value the abundance it already has. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has noted that Africa holds 60 percent of the world’s best solar resources, yet only 1 percent of installed solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity.
This single statistic shows that we are not short of potential. We are short of speed, financing, transmission and political conviction.
Kenya offers proof that a different path is not theoretical. According to the country’s energy regulator, the Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority (Epra), renewable sources supplied 78.79 percent of Kenya’s electricity in the second half of 2025, with geothermal alone accounting for 40.06 percent of the energy supplied to the interconnected grid.
This is not a fringe success. It is a serious national asset. It means Kenya already has a stronger foundation for clean industrial growth than many larger economies. The task now is to extend that logic from the grid to the wider economy.
Across the continent, positive trends continue. Ethiopia generated 99.99 percent of its power from renewable sources in 2023, according to the IEA. Morocco approved $32.5 billion in green hydrogen projects in 2025 and aims for 52 percent renewables by 2030.
These advances show clean energy is now a foundation for industrial policy, not just a climate goal.
This is where African ambition must become bolder. Governments should electrify public fleets as policy, not for public relations. Official vehicles, municipal buses and commuter systems should be the guaranteed market for African e-mobility.
Kenya is already moving: its VAT framework retains relief for electric motorcycles, bicycles, solar and lithium-ion batteries and electric buses. Wider charging infrastructure, concessional finance and smarter urban transport policy can turn tax signals into mass adoption.
The market is responding. A 2025 East Africa e-mobility assessment estimated that Kenya had around 9,000 electric vehicles in 2024, more than double the number in 2023, with electric motorcycles making up the bulk of the fleet.
Rwanda had about 500 pure electric four-wheelers and 5,000 electric motorcycles by 2024, supported by incentives and a discounted electricity tariff for public charging.
These are still early numbers, but they show that policy can create momentum long before a market reaches scale. Africa also has no excuse to remain a spectator in the battery economy. The continent already supplies the minerals that make electric mobility possible.
A 2025 factsheet from Agora Verkehrswende notes that the Democratic Republic of Congo produces about 74 percent of current global cobalt output; South Africa and Gabon are major manganese producers; Morocco accounts for around 13 percent of global phosphate output; and countries including Zimbabwe, Namibia, Madagascar, Mozambique and Tanzania are important to lithium and graphite supply.
Yet Africa still exports too much raw value and imports too much finished technology. The World Bank has argued that the EV battery value chain could quadruple the end value of battery minerals mined in Africa. That should be read as a development strategy, not a technical footnote.10,11.
None of this means abandoning the language of biodiversity. On the contrary, it means understanding biodiversity properly. Nature is not only something to protect at the edge of the economy. It is part of the economy’s operating system. Healthy watersheds support hydropower.
Intact landscapes protect rivers, soils and rainfall patterns. Geothermal fields, wind corridors and sun-rich arid lands are all natural infrastructure.
When the African Development Bank says the continent could mobilise an additional $1.43 trillion in domestic resources through deeper reforms and better use of its natural, fiscal, business and human capital, it is pointing to a larger truth: Africa’s real wealth is broader than what comes out of a fuel tanker.12
So the question before us is no longer whether Africa can participate in the energy transition. It already is. Now, will we lead boldly enough to reduce our vulnerability to outside shocks? We can keep importing volatility, or choose to build true sovereignty.