It must always be repeated, our daughter’s hair dryer consumes more in a year than a sub-Saharan African. Her average consumption is 180 kilowatt hours, compared to 5,500 for an Italian or 13,000 for an American. It is an injustice that has no comparison and that is very similar to what we have done in the past with slavery, because it is precisely this, letting humans be slaves to nature, which they consider very different from what most people here imagine.
Not having electricity means not having drinking water, not being able to store vaccines or food, not having lighting to study in the evening or to guarantee greater safety.
Those who have been to Africa understand well why people flee and, indeed, wonder why so few people do so. Welcome to Italy’s Mattei planannounced a year and a half ago now, certainly easily criticised, because it has no money, because some have been excluded, because there are many other similar initiatives, because we have been talking about it for centuries.
The attempt
But the attempt must be made, the injustice must be denounced, and then, for Italy, it is a question of reclaiming a role that belongs to it by tradition and by what Mattei did. Among many things, he was a realist and we need to start from this, to recognize that we Westerners, who lead international finance, cannot impose the model of renewable sources and ecological transition on the poorest in the world. We struggle to do this, despite mountains of subsidies, let alone Africans.
They need electricity and this must be made with the same power plants with which we make electricity, that is, with fossils. We need to have the courage to use a sort of blasphemy nowadays, coal, because it is absurd that in Mozambique, or in Kenya, coal plants cannot be built because they are against the objectives of decarbonisation, while they export coal to Asia.
For decades we have been offering photovoltaic panels to Africans, but the overall capacity installed throughout Africa, a continent of 1.4 billion people, does not reach 15 GW, while in Italy alone we have over 30 thousand, which is no more than 10% of the electricity we consume.
Africa is full of gas, if it’s not coal, let’s make them build combined cycle gas plants, perhaps supplied by Italian companies, before the Chinese ones arrive. Then we must ensure that their gas exports increase, so that they count more in global energy exports, which today are too concentrated in the Middle East.
Italy, again thanks to Mattei, has long been a hub, a gas interconnection, with its two gas pipelines linking Sicily to Tunisia and Libya, but it can, and must, be strengthened. Two large regasifiers are planned in Calabria and Sicily, so think about bringing on board the project immediately some African countries that are thinking about exports. Or we can decisively reopen the Galsi project from Algeria to Sardinia and then bring gas to the rest of Europe, perhaps connecting it with the other project, also forgotten, in Nigeria via Niger.
Realism, concreteness, action, this is what Mattei had, for the good of Italy and this is needed today, also for the good of Africa.
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The morning
