In Climate Talks, Africa Mortgages Tomorrow Simply to Survive Today

Sep 13 , 2025.

At its launch in Nairobi two years ago, the Africa Climate Summit was billed as the forum that would at last give the continent a commanding voice in global climate talks. Last week, the second edition convened in Addis Abeba under the African Union’s (AU) auspices. The speeches were longer and the guest list grander, yet the impression that the gathering was sliding into ritual rather than reform was hard to miss.

Even seasoned delegates and veterans of countless communiqués muttered that the carnival of panels and photo-ops felt eerily familiar.

It is stating the obvious that Africa emits only a sliver of the world’s carbon yet endures the steepest price for climate volatility. Droughts, floods and crop failures stalk tens of millions each year. The moral claim for compensation is incontestable. However, the flow of climate finance remains elusive, painfully slow and mainly takes the form of loans that fatten already heavy debt burdens. Instead of loosening the noose, many African governments end up borrowing more to pay for their own adaptation, mortgaging tomorrow to survive today.

That irony stings because, in the era of the global green transition, Africa is suddenly central to the world’s energy future. Its reserves of cobalt, lithium and rare earths, and its immense potential for solar and wind power, are coveted by China, the European Union (EU), the United States (US) and the Gulf. Competition for influence is fierce. Yet, the fear is that the old pattern of raw-material extraction, where profits are exported and value added elsewhere, will resurface, leaving dependency deeper than before.

Summit organisers promised a united African voice. Fragmentation quickly punctured that ambition. From the Sahel region to the Horn of Africa, rival countries' interests dilute the continent’s leverage at the annual COP extravaganzas. In Addis Abeba, heads of state issued joint statements by day and pursued bilateral deals by night. That disunity emboldens external powers to play capitals against one another, securing concessions at bargain prices.

There is an entrenched view that for Africa’s diplomacy to bite, its leaders should present climate finance as compensation, not charity. The advocates of this view ought to wield their bargaining chips (minerals, sunshine, wind and a billion-strong youthful population) to demand industrialisation, technology transfer and sovereignty over green resources. The fear is that without these, Africans will continue to pay for adaptation with borrowed money and borrowed time.

After two summits, the verdict is sobering. Without robust delivery mechanisms, strict accountability and tangible investment in adaptation, Nairobi and Addis Abeba will be remembered as costly theatrical set-pieces. The script is now predictable. They trumpet “milestones”, unveil “partnerships”, recycle calls for more funding, lament meagre disbursements, plead for debt relief, and repeat.

A growing band of activists is weary of the routine. They reject both the charity model and market-based fixes, instead advancing alternatives grounded in justice and systemic reform. To them, modern climate finance reeks of “carbon colonialism”. They accuse African negotiators of a “sell-out” for flirting with carbon markets and denounce “extractive colonialism”, in which African territories are sliced up for external speculators. They place the problem in what they label “kleptocratic capitalism”, a global system built on primitive accumulation and dispossession.

Their case is blunt. The industrial North owes Africa a “climate debt” not only for historic emissions but also for having strait-jacketed the continent’s development. Reparations, not loans and compensation, the latter a concept of financial payment to cover a financially accessible loss or damage, should sit at the centre of any settlement. For these cohorts of intellectuals on the continent, far from helping, today’s financial schemes entrench neo-colonial structures and magnify financial vulnerability. Debt, carbon markets and “green” funds intersect, they argue, to keep Africa subordinate.

The cure they prescribe is a decisive break with exploitative global capitalism and a shift to development strategies designed and led on the continent.

Others question that diagnosis from a different angle. They recoil from perpetual victimhood and urge Africans to leapfrog straight to renewable energy and lead by example rather than wait for handouts. Solar mini-grids and cheap wind farms, they observe, can light villages today without a cent from abroad.

Several proposals offer ideas to shrink dependence on external cash. One is to tap domestic capital markets, unlocking the continent’s estimated two trillion dollars in pension and insurance assets. Another is to seed local green-bond markets and national climate funds with muscular civil-society oversight. Decentralised finance that channels resources directly to local governments and communities promises accountability while bypassing rent-seeking middlemen.

Regional co-operation is gathering steam as well. Platforms such as the Southern Africa Climate Finance Partnership, and initiatives by regional development banks, seek to pool resources and set standards untainted by donor agendas. Fiscal tinkering, like windfall taxes on extractive industries and the plugging of illicit financial leaks, could raise tidy sums while boosting autonomy.

Sceptics counter that an exclusive fixation on reparations and anti-market dogma ignores stubborn realities. No accepted formula exists to quantify, let alone enforce, vast reparations; pressing the point might provoke diplomatic backlash or freeze existing funds. Anti-market rhetoric also overlooks the billions already mobilised by carbon credits, blended finance and private investors. A model built solely on grants or apologies would risk cementing dependence on unpredictable flows.

Many African technocrats prefer to sharpen the tools at hand, negotiating softer terms within today’s system while still courting commercial capital. What matters, they insist, is not the label on the instrument but its cost and the control it confers. They believe Africa’s agency is greater than the grievance narrative presents. Governments, firms and civic groups are shaping rules and inventing home-grown models. The prudent path, many say, is to reform the system from within while exploiting every lever available.

That mission is tougher because Africa’s intellectual leadership has faded. During the era of Meles Zenawi and Thabo Mbeki, the continent projected a confident and coherent line. Meles’s dense policy papers and Mbeki’s talk of an “African Renaissance” pushed debate beyond plaintive appeals. Their departure left a void no successor has yet filled.

Veteran negotiators such as the DR Congo’s Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, Senegal’s El Hadji Mbaye Diagne and Ibrahim Cheikh Diong, Guinea’s Alpha Kaloga, Egypt’s Mohammed Nasr and the current chair of the African Group, Ali Mohamemd, are more disciplined but less daring. Mounting external debt burdens that their constituent countries carry weaken their hand, narrowing their ambition from sweeping blueprints to incremental haggling over modest pledges.

Innovation, such as green bonds, de-risking tools, and micro-insurance for farmers, continues, yet donors still write much of the rulebook. Critics mutter about “bad leadership” and “self-inflicted wounds”, echoing Mbeki’s old demand for quality governance and African ownership. In the absence of Meles's and Mbeki's intellectual audacity, negotiations revolve around procedural fairness and small gains. That may once have sufficed. However, if the summit cannot translate rhetoric into megawatts installed, adaptation projects launched and lives protected, historians will archive it as an expensive ritual, proof that pageantry is no substitute for power.

The real test is not merely to prise more money from tight-fisted purses. It is to guide funds in ways that harden resilience and deepen accountability for Africans, on African terms. Summits can set the stage; only concrete deeds will keep the lights on and the water flowing in a warming world.

PUBLISHED ON Sep 13,2025 [ VOL 26 , NO 1324]