The Lie Keeping Africa in the Dark

How the world's climate promises became a new way to keep Africa poor.

In 1978, a Czech dissident named Vaclav Havel wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless. He wasn’t president yet, just a playwright the communist regime had banned from the theater, and he’d spend the next several years in prison for writing things like this.

Vaclav Havel.

The essay opens with a greengrocer (a small shop owner who sells vegetables) who puts a sign in his shop window every morning: “Workers of the world, unite!” — one of those communist party slogans the regime expected every shop to display. He doesn’t believe in it, and he’s never really thought about whether he does. The sign goes up because that’s what every shop on the street does, and if he didn’t put it up there’d be consequences for him and his family. So up it goes.

The communist system survived not because of the secret police or the army, but because of this greengrocer. Millions of ordinary people performed a lie they didn’t believe in, day after day, because going along felt easier than refusing. As Havel wrote: “for by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.”

There is a sign in the window right now, and it’s about my continent.

The sign today says “Save the planet,” or “Net Zero by 2050.” The words change, but it works the same way as that sign in Prague.

Banks sign net-zero pledges and quietly stop funding energy projects in Africa while continuing to fund the exact same projects in America, Canada, and Norway. The African Energy Chamber has a term for this: financial apartheid.

Meanwhile, NGOs run campaigns like #StopEACOP to pressure Western financiers out of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, a project Uganda and Tanzania are building to export their own oil. The European Parliament actually passed a resolution against it in September 2022. Two sovereign African countries building infrastructure with their own resources, and the European Parliament felt it was their business.

And every quarter, investors publish sustainability reports full of net-zero targets that have almost nothing to do with whether anyone in sub-Saharan Africa can turn on a light. Africa is responsible for about 4% of global CO₂ emissions. Four percent. No serious calculation says that cutting off financing to the continent that contributes the least will change the trajectory of the climate. But the reports still need to be filed, so the money goes elsewhere.

Annual CO₂ emissions by country, 2024. Africa, the continent being told to give up fossil fuels, is barely visible on the scale. Source: Our World in Data, Global Carbon Budget 2025.

Back home, 600 million people on my continent don’t have electricity.

The WHO estimates that cooking with wood and charcoal kills around 800,000 people a year in Africa from the smoke alone, most of them women and children. The solution is LPG, which comes from natural gas, but building the gas infrastructure to distribute it gets caught in the same net-zero logic that chokes everything else.

Nigeria sits on some of the largest natural gas reserves in the world and its power grid collapsed again in February 2026. At Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital in 2025, three ICU patients died during a blackout because the hospital had gone days without power. Twenty-six percent of health facilities across sub-Saharan Africa have no electricity at all. And the people signing those net-zero pledges in London and New York will never know their names.

No single bank executive decided to keep Africans in the dark. But the net-zero pledges created a structure where not funding African fossil fuels became the easy, compliant thing to do, and funding them became a career risk. So the money dries up, and the sign stays in the window, and the system holds together the same way Havel described it nearly fifty years ago: not because anyone believes in it, but because everyone goes along.

Uganda and Tanzania had to go find African and Gulf banks to finance the same pipeline the European Parliament tried to block because the Western ones walked away. It’s 79% complete now and should be done by July 2026. They found the money and built it anyway, but that they had to go looking tells you whose rules these are.

Havel spent nearly five years in prison after writing The Power of the Powerless. He believed that when even one person stops performing the lie, it shows everyone else that refusing is possible. The Velvet Revolution happened in 1989, the communist regime fell without a war, and Havel became president of a free Czechoslovakia.

My continent hasn’t had its Velvet Revolution on energy yet. Most of the institutions that matter are still going along. But some African countries are starting to take the sign down, and others will follow.

I grew up in Senegal, and I remember my grandmother cooking over fire because there was nothing else when the power went out. Cutting off Africa’s energy doesn’t save the planet. It just guarantees that the next generation grows up the same way mine did.

That’s what I’m working to change through Prosperity Not Poverty — because African nations have the right to use their own resources to build their own futures.