The Rich World Burned the Planet and Africa Is Paying the Bill

Africa did not set the planet on fire. We are roughly 18 percent of humanity and about 4 percent of its carbon emissions. Yet when the floods came to Mozambique in 2019, Cyclone Idai killed more than a thousand people across southern Africa. When the Horn of Africa dried out between 2020 and 2023, millions of children were pushed toward hunger while the world argued about who should pay. Ask the mother who lost her harvest, her well, and her goats in a single season whose fault it was. She knows exactly whose fault it is.

So let us say the quiet part loudly. The countries that built their wealth on coal, oil, and gas are now asking the poorest continent to adapt, wait, and be grateful for crumbs. That is not justice. That is a bill sent to the wrong address.

Consider the promises. In 2009, at Copenhagen, wealthy nations pledged $100 billion a year by 2020 to help developing countries cope with a crisis they did not cause. The OECD later reported that the target was finally met in 2022, two years late, and much of that money came as loans rather than grants. Loans. To families who have never emitted anything more dangerous than a cooking fire, we offered debt for the flood defenses they needed.

Adaptation is where the failure becomes obscene. The UN Environment Programme's Adaptation Gap Report has repeatedly estimated that developing countries need somewhere between $215 billion and $387 billion a year to adapt to climate change. International public adaptation finance flowing to those countries in 2022 was around $28 billion. Do the arithmetic, and then ask yourself why a seawall in Lagos, a drought-resistant seed bank in Malawi, or an early warning system in Mozambique still exists mostly in a donor's slide deck.

The loss and damage fund, agreed at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh in 2022 after decades of African negotiators begging for it, was finally made operational in 2023. Its initial pledges amounted to well under a billion dollars. That is less than the price of a single modest offshore gas project. The world found the money for war in Ukraine within weeks. For Africa's climate victims, it is still finding excuses.

Now look at where the investment goes. The International Energy Agency has consistently shown that Africa attracts only a sliver of global clean energy investment, around two cents of every dollar. Meanwhile, about 600 million Africans still lack access to electricity. The continent has some of the best solar irradiation on Earth. It has geothermal resources in the Rift Valley that Kenya has begun to harness with real success. It has wind corridors and hydropower potential sitting unused. And yet we are told that our task is to wait for global capital to decide we are worth the risk.

Some of that capital is arriving with strings attached. Consider the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, a roughly 1,400-kilometre heated pipeline running from Uganda's oil fields to the Tanzanian coast, with TotalEnergies at the centre of the project. Activists and affected communities have documented displaced families, disputed compensation, and environmental risks to Lake Victoria's watershed. Whatever you think of the project, the question must be asked: who gets the revenue, who gets the risk, and who gets a vote? When a pipeline is sold as development while the people living beside it are pushed off their land without fair compensation, the word "development" becomes a lie.

And we cannot blame only the foreigners. Every climate dollar that vanishes into a minister's offshore account, every adaptation project that exists on paper and collapses in the first rain, every contract awarded to a cousin of a cousin, is a betrayal of our own people. Corruption is not a cultural quirk. It is a death sentence for infrastructure. A dam built with bribes will fail, and when it does, the poor downstream pay with their lives. The collapse of dams in Derna, Libya, during the 2023 floods, which killed thousands, was not just a storm. It was a warning ignored by those who controlled the infrastructure and the budgets.

This is the context the webinar hosted by SAIIA and Agence Française de Développement is right to examine: climate change is not only an environmental crisis but a question of economic justice, inequality, and who holds power over the future. The answer, too often, is a handful of foreign governments, multinational firms, and African officials who treat public money as private property.

The solution is not to beg. It is to build institutions strong enough to demand what we are owed and to spend it honestly. Botswana has shown what disciplined governance and prudent management of natural resources can achieve across decades. Mauritius has demonstrated that a small island state can attract investment and build resilient institutions when rule of law is respected. Morocco's Noor solar complex at Ouarzazate shows that large-scale renewable projects can be financed and delivered when governments commit to clear, long-term contracts. These are not miracles. They are the results of boring, transparent, accountable governance.

So here is what must happen. African governments must publish every climate finance flow, every adaptation contract, and every loss and damage claim, line by line, in open data that journalists and citizens can audit. Regional power pools such as the Southern African Power Pool and the Eastern Africa Power Pool must be strengthened so that clean electricity can move across borders on rules that protect investors and consumers alike. Property rights must be secured so that farmers and communities can invest in resilience without fear of losing their land to a concession. Independent judiciaries must be empowered to punish corruption in climate projects, not protect the people who steal from them. And private enterprise, especially African-owned renewable developers, must be given a level playing field, not a rigged auction controlled by whoever pays the biggest bribe.

To the wealthy nations: you broke your word on $100 billion. Deliver grants for adaptation, not loans dressed up as aid. Fund loss and damage at a scale that matches the harm you have caused. Stop treating the African continent as a fossil fuel reserve and a carbon offset dumping ground.

To our leaders: publish the accounts. Prosecute the thieves. Stop signing pipelines that displace families and call it progress.

And to every African reading this: ask your Member of Parliament what your country received for climate adaptation last year, and who received it. Demand the answer in writing. Share it. Make them uncomfortable. The climate debt is real, the money is out there, and it will not reach your village unless you refuse to accept silence as an answer.

Africa did not cause this crisis, but Africa will not be the one to surrender to it.

Based on reporting by SAIIA