17 June 2023
One Canadian company has begun drilling for oil on sacred and protected lands, but so far coming up dry
Efforts by ReconAfrica, a deceptively named Vancouver-based mining company, to drill for oil in land adjacent to a sensitive UNESCO World Heritage Site on the border of Namibia and Botswana, appear to be coming up dry.
ReconAfrica had previously claimed that there were 120 billion barrels of oil beneath land just outside the Okavango Delta in Namibia, named an international heritage for its significance to the San Indigenous people and home for endangered species, such as cheetah, white rhinoceros, black rhinoceros, African wild dog, lions and, most crucially, endangered savanna elephants.
The company’s lease encompasses three national parks — Bwabwata in Botswana, and Khaudum and Mangetti in Namibia. Fortunately for supporters of Indigenous rights and the environment, it turns out, as Harvard geologist Paul Hoffman put it in an interview with Rolling Stone, “that mining companies are often better at drilling into investors’ wallets than they are at drilling into rocks.”
With Canada proudly boasting its international climate commitments to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, the activities of Canadian extractive companies abroad warrant heightened scrutiny. Nowhere more so than the African continent, where residents have to deal with the worst consequences for the climate crisis they didn’t create.
Offloading carbon emissions to the developing world
Karen Hamilton, the director of Above Ground, a human rights and corporate accountability organisation, told Ricochet that companies like ReconAfrica are seizing upon weaker regulatory structures abroad to engage in extractive processes that would be unacceptable at home.
“The emissions and consequences of that production aren’t felt in Canada. They’re not in our nationally determined contributions. It’s not something that we talk about domestically. The impacts are felt everywhere, but they’re not discussed in the context of Canada’s climate commitments,” said Hamilton.
Had ReconAfrica found the oil they were looking for, it would have made a few people a lot of money while trapping Namibia and neighbouring Botswana into fossil fuel dependency and cooking the planet in the process.
The oil itself, and the profits it makes, would go largely towards fuelling lavish lifestyles outside the continent. Half of people in sub-Saharan Africa, or 597 million people, don’t have access to electricity. They won’t be the ones benefiting from an oil bonanza, despite the company founder Craig Steinke’s paternalistic rhetoric about “energy independence.”
“The emissions and the consequences of that production aren’t felt in Canada. They’re not in our nationally determined contributions. It’s not something that we talk about domestically. The impacts are felt everywhere, but they’re not discussed in the context of Canada’s climate commitments.”
“How do you even have another industry if you don’t have energy?” Steinke told the Globe and Mail, ignoring the abundant solar and wind resources in the region.
“It can’t be done. This area needs help.”
While there are weaker regulations in the developing world, Hamilton noted that Canadian fossil fuel companies in Africa face the same issues of lack of consent from local populations as they do at home.
“There is a corporate culture around engagement with local rights holders, which has a very poor track record. We’re not seeing better practices taking place abroad by any means,” she said.
Rolling Stone reporter Jeff Gooddell, who reported from the site of ReconAfrica’s drilling, wrote that concern about a lack of consultation with impacted communities “was widely echoed by virtually everyone” he spoke to.
Goodell’s translator, local activist Stefan Kudumo, expressed this frustration when he asked,
“Why don’t they talk to the people whose lives are impacted most?”
According to a January 2022 complaint from the Legal Assistance Centre, a Namibian human rights organisation, six families said ReconAfrica’s representatives “entered their properties without permission, concluded seismic survey activities, and compelled them to sign papers without explaining their contents before leaving.”
ReconAfrica Isn’t Alone
While ReconAfrica may be the most prominent example of Canadian fossil fuel extraction in Africa, buttressed by an RCMP investigation into allegations of bribing Namibian officials and securities fraud for misleading investors, it’s far from the only example of a Canadian company fuelling the climate crisis through its activities abroad.
Africa Energy Corp is involved in offshore drilling off the western and southern coasts of South Africa while Africa Oil Corp has licenses in Guyana, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa and in the Senegal Guinea Bissau Joint Development Zone. Both firms are Vancouver-based.
To its credit, beginning this year, Export Development Canada no longer provides financial assistance to fossil fuel projects abroad. But that hasn’t stopped the private sector from stepping up its assistance. Since its inception, the Canadian state’s colonial imperative has been rooted in a “mindset of going out there to take whatever is there”
While ReconAfrica is the most prominent example of Canadian fossil fuel exploration in Africa, bolstered by an RCMP investigation into allegations of bribing Namibian officials and securities fraud to mislead investors, it is far from the only example of a Canadian company through its ReconAfrica the climate crisis fuels activities abroad.
According to German climate and human rights organisation Urgewald, Canadian companies – RBC and Sun Life – committed nearly $2 billion to fossil fuel investments in Africa from January 2019 to July 2022. Notably, both companies have committed to achieving net zero by 2050. This is a blatant example of corporate “greenwashing” derided by former Canadian Environment and Climate Minister Catherine McKenna, who now chairs a UN group focused on achieving net zero.
Since 2019, RBC has lent or acquired over $1 billion to companies expanding fossil fuel production. Sun Life invested $936 million in July 2022, according to data from proprietary financial databases Bloomberg, Refinitiv, and IJGlobal. This is a small but disproportionate fraction –2% – of the $98 billion committed to fossil fuel development in Africa by 352 financial institutions, including big American players like BlackRock ($12 billion), Vanguard ($8.3 billion) and Citigroup ($5.5 billion). and JP Morgan Chase ($5.1 billion).
RBC’s investments include $36 million in stocks and bonds in the East Africa crude oil pipeline from Uganda to Tanzania, which runs through the basin of Africa’s Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest, and is expected to displace 118,000 people, according to environmental group Stand.Earth becomes. Overall, RBC is now the world’s largest financier of fossil fuel projects, overtaking JPMorgan, with Canadian banks increasingly seen as “lenders of last resort” to fossil fuel companies.
Evelyn Mayanja, a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Carleton University whose research focuses on the political economy of natural resource development in Africa, told Ricochet that Canadian corporate activities abroad cannot be viewed outside the context of colonialism.
African countries faced failure and relied on investment from wealthier countries, allowing companies to step in and benefit from their resources while people depended on foreign aid.
African leaders, such as Patrice Lumumba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, who seek to break this dependency and take control of their country’s resources, are being ousted by Western powers in favour of more accommodating leaders. The model of an obedient Western client state was apartheid South Africa, which occupied Namibia – then known as South West Africa – until 1990.
To his credit, as of this year, Export Development Canada has stopped providing financial support to foreign fossil fuel projects. That hasn’t stopped the private sector from stepping up its aid, however. That doesn’t mean that all of the African continent’s problems are due to foreign powers, she stressed.
“Yes, there is a leadership gap. But this is also exacerbated by global politics, which often do not want to leave Africa alone,” Mayanja said.
Since its inception, the Canadian state’s colonial imperative has been rooted in the “go out and take whatever mindset is there,” which constitutes a “psychological syndrome of greed” that has international implications, Mayanja added.
As a result, corporations that run on fossil fuels have an “insatiable appetite,” she said, which leads them to exploit the resources of others before other companies can get to them. With the end of the fossil fuel era, according to Mayanja, there is a “rush for what’s left.”
“Angry lions are charging to grab whatever is left out there with no ethics, morality or respect for humanity and the planet,” she said.
Mayanja said this explains why Canadian fossil fuel companies are so active abroad, even though Canada has the third largest oil reserves in the world. Describing the thought process, she said, “First, take whatever’s out there and maybe someday we’ll come back and leverage what we can get at home.” She warned that ReconAfrica’s apparent failure will not stop her from exploring for oil elsewhere. “They will never stop until they find what they are looking for,” she said. “You’re very, very resilient.”
Financial institutions are part of the same money-making system, so naturally they would try to make their own profits from fossil fuel company profits, to heck with climate commitments. These commitments are only made to obtain a societal license for the same old extractivist activities, Manyanja said.
While it’s tempting to simply say that the government must step in to prevent banks from investing in harmful commodity policies, Mayanja says any meaningful change must come from below. Ultimately, the responsibility lies with us.
“We have to think about dismantling the economic system,” she said. “How would that happen? It’s a long process, but even if the Berlin Wall comes down, nothing is impossible.”
Sources: https://gracanews.info/canadas-neocolonialism-in-africa-continues-to-expand/
