We're squabbling over pipelines while the world moves beyond oil

In the past decade, a number of African countries have discovered, rather late, that they had oil and other extractives all along. 

Then prices tumbled, even before they had sold a single barrel, raining on the party.

Things are about to get worse. New technologies are testing the sustainability of fossil fuels that have been the source of energy for many years. 

The idea of Africa’s time being here is getting darker by the day. 

Consequently, it is prudent at this time to suspend all heavy investments related to fossil fuel and focus attention on innovative solutions that would stand the test of time.

In 1962, an American professor of communication, Everett Rogers, posited the theory of Diffusion of Innovations in his book of the same title, first published in 1962. Its fifth and most recent edition was published in 2003.

Rogers argues that diffusion is the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time amongst the audience-participants in a social system.

He proposed that four main elements influence the spread of a new idea: the innovation itself, communication channels, time, and a social system. This process relies heavily on human capital.

Rogers further argued that innovation must be widely adopted in order to sustain itself.

Within the rate of adoption, there is a point at which an innovation reaches critical mass. The categories of adopters are: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. 

Considering new technologies in the energy sector, the place of fossil fuel products could perhaps be categorised as late majority.

The enforcement of ever-lower emission levels, global warming, and alternative energy sources are making fossil fuels unpopular. 

The buzz is around green energy. There have been discoveries around clean water as a source of energy, but the real buzz is over electric cars. Indeed Tesla Motors’ Model X can do 414 kilometres without recharge. 

Africa has no chance of making it with fossil fuels. Any investments like oil pipelines is, therefore, simply burying good money into bad projects. 

A NEW SUN

Any such resources should be better utilised to build local research capacity and in supporting promising innovations. 

There is much more innovation emerging in many African countries.

However, governments and local capital are not paying attention as they are blinded by the glamour of foreign technologies and the lure of international capital.  

Kenya, for example, has made such a huge impact that it is now referred to as the Silicon Savannah. The majority of African innovations, however, go unreported and uncelebrated.

Indeed foreign media has done more in showcasing local innovations than the local media. There appears to be an awful lack of capacity for technology reporting in African media.

Local media appears to be conflating reviews of foreign-manufactured consumer technologies and reporting about cutting-edge, emergent technologies.   

Back to the story of oil. Mention oil and virtually everybody thinks wealth. However, if you thought that oil will take Africa to Canaan, you are dead wrong. 

The research around energy is mind-boggling. It is happening so fast that Africa will soon be left holding a yelling, cursed oily baby. 

A total of 35 countries are collaborating to replicate the sun here on earth and use it as a source of energy. 

The project, dubbed ITER (Latin for "The Way"), is under way in southern France to test nuclear fusion as a new energy source.

If this physics experiment succeeds, it would amount to what Fareed Zakaria has described as one of “mankind’s greatest achievement ever.”

AFRICA'S LEAP FROG

Already, a team of scientists from the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have for the first time, Philip Ball of Nature Magazine says, extracted more energy from controlled nuclear fusion than was absorbed by the fuel to trigger it, crossing an important symbolic threshold on the long path toward exploiting this virtually boundless source of energy.

New energy products will emerge to undermine fossil fuels especially in Africa where effective infrastructure does not exist. 

Tesla, for example, says that they have made a home battery, called Powerwall, that charges using electricity generated from solar panels, or when utility rates are low, and powers the entire home in the evening.

It also fortifies the home against power outages by providing a backup electricity supply. "Automated, compact and simple to install, Powerwall offers independence from the utility grid and the security of an emergency backup," says Tesla's website. It is indeed built for Africa. 

Africa need not develop in a linear format. The continent can leapfrog into a completely new frontier of innovative solutions.

Oil producing countries have noted increased research in renewable energy and they are in the process of divesting from oil into new industries such as manufacturing. 

Dubai, for example, is increasingly becoming a global commodities exchange centre yet they do not have any agricultural production. 

The Emirates are clearly preparing for a new future, away from futureless oil, and they are by no means the only ones preparing for a different future.

THE NEW SAUDI ARABIA

A December 2015 report from Mckinsey Global Institute, titled Moving Saudi Arabia’s economy beyond oil, says a productivity-led economic transformation could enable Saudi Arabia to double its GDP again and create as many as six million new jobs by 2030.

The report estimates this would require about $4 trillion in investment. Eight sectors — mining and metals, petrochemicals, manufacturing, retail and wholesale trade, tourism and hospitality, healthcare, finance, and construction — have the potential to generate more than 60 per cent of this growth opportunity.

Ironically, the sectors that Saudi Arabia is targeting are precisely what most African countries wanted to achieve in their vision reports. Kenya’s vision 2030 seeks to exploit virtually the same sectors with the addition of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs). 

ICTs still have the greatest potential for new innovations as well as greater contribution to GDP. 

Africa’s population dividend is perhaps its greatest untapped resource. African youth now produce as good video games as those in demand elsewhere, but very few Africans know that there is capacity for the gaming industry to thrive and take advantage of the global $103 billion market.

Like Everett Rogers envisaged in his theory, if a product is in the market for too long, it will eventually be disrupted and only laggards will continue to hope in it. 

COMMODITIES EXCHANGE

Africa should focus energies on research and innovation for sustainable development. This was the path Asia’s Newly Industrialised Countries followed, and they succeeded far beyond oil-producing countries. 

It is no longer sexy to talk about fossil fuels where new technologies will certainly disrupt the status quo. It is better for Africa to project into the future and invest prudently.  No one is saying that the Lamu Port should not be built, just that we have to re-think the fundamentals of its construction – for oil or for agriculture?

If the port becomes a major commodities exchange point, it would pull agriculture in the country into new heights of productivity.

Nelson Mandela once said: "Our human compassion binds us the one to the other - not in pity or patronisingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future." 

Let Africa for once escape the false hope of wealth in fossil fuels and develop the capacity to innovate for a sustainable future.  

After all, Africa is home to 60 per cent of the world's arable land. The continent needs to figure out how to use its land and population dividend to change the world.

The writer is an associate professor at University of Nairobi’s School of Business. Twitter: @bantigito