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World leaders failed to secure a binding global treaty on reducing carbon emissions at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen – not least due to opposition from a radical group including Venezuela and Sudan, as well as differences between global giants led by the United States and China. Leaders did secure a deal to limit

Too often ignored except in times of extreme crisis, Lesotho is looking to emerge from years of political instability and economic malaise under previous coalition governments, as the Basotho population counts on newly-elected tycoon Prime Minister Sam Matekane to usher in transformative change.

African nations, the governments of partner countries, international financial institutions (IFIs) and private investors are increasing their commitments to achieving universal energy access, the seventh of the United Nation’s sustainable development goals (SDG7). But the prospects of reaching the SDG7 target by 2030 are receding as population numbers continue to rise. A daunting amount of work remains to be done if SDG7 is to be achieved. In a newly published report commissioned by the Africa-EU Energy Partnership (AEEP), Cross-border Information – the parent company of African Energy – has analysed financial flows towards SDG7 over the past seven years and their estimated potential trajectories to 2030 and beyond.

African electricity markets are on the threshold of genuine reform in 2024, even if policy-makers’ grandest ambitions are destined to meet with disappointment. African Energy has examined the first data that has emerged from the third development phase of the African Union’s Continental Master Plan and found much to applaud.

African Energy’s investigation into National Oil Corporation (NOC)’s large budget and the failings at two of its most important upstream oil and gas projects shows how events at the national oil company holds significance far beyond the small number of oil majors and their partners who are directly involved. Understanding how Libya’s hydrocarbons sector is being run is a matter of vital concern to the Libyan people, whose futures are tied to its success or failure. The investigation should also be of prime interest to a wide range of African Energy subscribers, including those involved in renewable and thermal power or the trade in gas and liquid fuels. Sooner or later, resolving the problems that African Energy is exposing will require the involvement of businesses across the whole energy sector spectrum.

With African electricity supply industries in a state of flux, everyone agrees the infrastructure needed for economic development can only come from the private sector, but the existing financial and commercial models are inadequate – and a desperate need for investment in transmission only makes this financing challenge harder. Some new thinking about how to crack these problems was presented at the African Energy Forum in Barcelona, but the boldest ideas require a leap of faith, writes John Hamilton*

The images of grief and riot that followed the assassination of opposition leader Chokri Belaïd on 6 February highlight the extent to which the first, and so far most successful, of the Arab Spring revolutions has been put in jeopardy by ideological and factional divisions among the country’s new leaders. The killing was quickly interpreted as marking a violent new phase in a region-wide struggle between democratic modernisers – who include secular politicians like Belaïd and President Moncef Marzouki, but also mainstream figures in the Islamist Ennahda party such as prime minister Hamadi Jebali – and ultra-radical Salafists.

The entry into Goma of rebel and Rwandan forces is a catastrophe for Democratic Republic of Congo and threatens a return to wider conflict in the Great Lakes region. International efforts have so far failed to secure peace in troubled eastern Congo – which will require difficult decisions and major efforts to curb Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s ambitions, overcome DRC President Félix Tshisekedi’s failings and restore trade in the region’s critical minerals to a legal footing.

The new NDC administration is promising a radical shake-up of Ghanaian institutions and spending, including another stab at electricity sector privatisation – in an attempt to carry through what John Mahama promised when he was last president, a decade ago. Delivering meaningful reform will provide an even greater challenge now than it did for his last government, writes Jon Marks.

Questions of greater social equity and sustainable development, more stringent governance and controls over globalisation widely discussed in a world looking to emerge from coronavirus are all ideas that President John Magufuli has worked into Tanzania’s policy mix since taking office in November 2015. Magufuli has built up popular support with his assaults on international capital, donor interference and even Beijing and the burden of Chinese debt. However, Tanzania’s experience suggests that good ideas do not make for good policy if they are wrongly implemented.

For a candidate who promised to “drain the swamp” and represent communities ground down by the depredations of big business, President-elect Donald Trump has done a good job of placing those he attacked before his election into positions of power. Investment bank Goldman Sachs has three former and current executives in key positions. Big Oil is represented not only by climate change sceptics, but in ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson it has one of its genuine stars at the helm of US foreign policy.

Production cuts by a majority of Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) producers, working in coordination with non-Opec exporters led by Russia, have helped to raise oil prices from their 2014-16 lows; the strategy seems likely to maintain crude benchmarks at around $50 for some time. While second-guessing the oil price is a hazardous business, African Energy’s soundings of major international oil companies (IOCs) suggest this represents a ‘new normal’ for the industry, as factored into corporations’ base case scenario-planning.

Egypt could have a future as a Mediterranean gas exporter. Rising debts owed by Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation (EGPC) and other post-revolution problems weigh on international oil companies, but IOCs and industry analysts are optimistic about the prospects for further hydrocarbons discoveries in the Nile Delta, Western Desert and other regions, reflected in the latest EGPC licensing round bidding.

It hardly rates on the scale of the drama that a courageous Tunisian population delivered to the world in ousting Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, but manoeuvrings by members of the former presidential circle to allow them to profit handsomely with little effort from the award of contracts for a gas-fired

Efforts to establish a national unity government, agreed in principle by negotiators on 17 December, are foundering. United Nations Security Council resolution 2259, which endorsed the political agreement brokered by UN Support Mission in Libya chief Martin Kobler, gave a nine-member Presidency Council (currently based in Tunis) 30 days to form an administration and gain the ratification of the rival House of Representatives (HoR) and General National Congress. These two bodies will eventually become the parliament and State Council.