For Immediate release
Opening Address by Bobby Peek at the Oilwatch Africa Conference
Monday, 19 August 2024 at Blue Waters Hotel, Durban
Friends, our struggle, our campaigning, our work is in the here and now as environmental injustices and struggles are waged on many fronts. On the 18 July I was in Tanzania and the front page of The Guardian featured key issues that many of us deal with here: – Palm oil production, renewable energy, small scale mining and a headline on the East African Crude Oil Pipeline. These were not good stories for the people we work with, but I want to highlight the fact that the issues we have been challenging for decades are now mainstream. We have a duty to act now and to act fast to ensure corporates and the politically corrupt do not appropriate our struggles and turn them against us.
In July of 2000, Oilwatch International held its first Annual General Meeting here in Durban, South Africa. Now 24 years later, we once again welcome Oilwatch including Oilwatch Africa and Oilwatch International to our eThekwini. We welcome our African brothers and sisters from far and wide, from Nigeria to Kenya, from Sudan to Togo, from Mozambique to the Democratic Republic of Congo, and from various parts of South Africa. At the outset I must apologise for the challenges that borders and our governments have brought to us as they stick with colonialism and the demands of exclusion on our own continent.
24 years ago, we met for the first time as comrades in struggle. Now a quarter of a century later we remain in struggle, building our movement across Africa and across the world.
Today, we face a world that has breached 1.5°C for the past 14 months; we put out a warning call about this in 2000. Today, this city we are in, eThekwini (called Durban by its colonial name), is a hotspot in terms of climate chaos. Comrades, climate chaos is the norm now. This climate chaos is fuelled by the undemocratic failed negotiations at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The corporates and the political elite, that gave us this crisis, are the very same institutions that are saying we must trust them to solve a problem they created.
But the reality is clear for us all to see when Yalchin Rafiyev, the chief negotiator for the CoP29 presidency, said: “Traditional funding methods have proven to be inadequate to the challenges of the climate crisis, so we have decided on a different approach. The fund will be capitalised with contributions from fossil-fuel countries and companies and will catalyse the private sector.” No comrades! We do not want corporate money; we want public money. That has been our demand. Comrades, they are privatising the very air that we breathe.
Last year, a record 2 500 oil and gas lobbyists arrived at CoP 28 – that is four times more than the previous record set at CoP 27 in Sharm al Sheikh. They included Comprador, NJ Ayuk of the Africa Energy Chamber who declared the outcome a triumph for the oil and gas industry but complained that African countries failed to unite on the need to drill and pump more gas. Just the year before, NJ Ayuk took a large delegation of African oil and gas lobbyists to CoP27 in Egypt to promote ‘the African agenda’ to “drill, baby drill”.
The fossil fuel industry and the political elite have enclosed the commons, excluded us from our democracy and externalised their profit-making pollution on us, killing us daily. In south Durban, which you will visit later this week, we can reflect on abandoned places – planned concentrations of capital waste that brings death to our neighbourhoods. As Ruth Gilmore, activist and Director of the Centre for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography at the University of New York, warned us about.
But I believe we are venturing into the era beyond the fossil fuel dependence that has left Durban a wasteland in which people call for all forms of oxygen, not just the air we breathe, but the oxygen of life and a people’s transition in society. A just transition that is built upon solidarity of all movements.
In 2005 groundWork said that ‘the real possibility that alternative energy sources, technologies, and applications might be taken up by the masses of the poor in a project that they define and drive, lies in connecting the promise of renewables with movements struggling for deep transformation of the way the world works.’
Here we must reflect on black feminist Marxist who calls on us to build a world we have in common. We can only build this if we engage in struggle that build solidarity across all struggles to emancipate ourselves from following solutions that are driven by those that have created the problems that bring chaos to our lives.
We must remember our connections with others in struggle and other platforms of our struggle. We must not forget the inextricably connected issues of fossil fuels and plastic production. 99% of all plastic that is produced comes from coal, oil and gas. The continued overproduction of plastic has become another mechanism for the plundering fossil fuel industry to flow through the economy and continue to profit off our planet. Let’s stop fossil fuels and so stop plastics too.
I want to welcome you here today in a busy period across Africa. This week, the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, Africa is meeting in Cape Town to sharpen their strategy against plastic production and pollution. Just last week we had Africans from across the continent working with the groundWork and South Durban Community Environmental Alliance team on energy democracy, on renewable energy solutions for people by people. Some of us have returned from a week of solidarity with Friends of the Earth Mozambique, also known as Justicia Ambiental or Ja! where we shared our work challenging corporate impunity. Two weeks ago, we met in Johannesburg under the Don’t Gas Africa campaign which was started by the African Coal Network and Powershift Africa, and in July the Africa Coal Network met in Tanzania, reflecting on fossil fuel struggles and the just transition.
It is clear that another world is possible and needed, that we need system change and not climate change, and that we need to have some for all, forever. To this end, the Africa Coal Network has moved on to become the Africa Just Transition Network, so that we can be clear that to get a world in common, we need all of society to change. Based upon this need for a transition of all of society, and not just a fossil fuel transition I welcome you with the hope that by the end of this week, we are stronger than we are today.
Let us build upon our victories of stopping Shell’s offshore drilling, stopping Shell fracking in the Karoo, stopping nuclear energy, stopping oil refineries in our neighbourhoods, stopping coal and gas fired power stations. Let us build upon our work together across Africa to STOP fossil fuels and work for renewable energy for people, by people and forever remain in solidarity, for we recognise that with renewable energy, there are those that pay the price for this energy. The families whose young children are mining in the DRC for minerals to make this possible, and the millions of Chinese communities and workers who pay the price for cheap renewable energy globally by receiving low wages, and the pollution that comes with cheap production.
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