Africa Must Drill, Sign Deals and Build Its Future – AEC’S NJ Ayuk

By Boris Esono Nwenfor

As foreign aid to Africa dwindles, from healthcare to the energy sector, voices like NJ Ayuk’s are rising in support of self-reliance. While the reduction in aid might seem alarming, Ayuk. The Executive Chairman of the African Energy Chamber (AEC) sees it as a long-overdue shift that will ultimately benefit the continent in the long run.

“It’s painful, but it had to happen,” NJ Ayuk argues. Over the past 30 years, Africa has received approximately $2.7 trillion in aid, yet the results have been largely disappointing. Instead of fostering development, excessive reliance on aid has weakened governance, increased government waste, and stifled the free market.

“Wherever we’ve seen so much aid, government performance has worsened,” he said, pointing out that a small elite has benefited while ordinary citizens remain trapped in poverty.

For Ayuk, this is Africa’s defining moment—a chance to take charge of its destiny, much like China, India, South Korea, and Taiwan did when they moved beyond aid dependence. The solution, he says, lies in boosting intra-African trade, cutting down tariffs, and facilitating seamless business operations across the continent.

“We have a population of 1.4 billion. If we trade among ourselves, we will be making so much money that we will be the ones giving aid instead of always begging,” he asserted.

In an interview with Boason Omofaye of Arise TV, NJ Ayuk focused on BP scraping renewables target, Trump terminating the Power Africa aid program and how to make Africa Energy poverty history.

Are you worried, Ayuk, at the speed at which foreign aid to Africa has been shut down or sharply reduced from health care to the power sector?

NJ Ayuk: No, I'm not worried. I think it's painful, but it's short-term pain, long-term gain. It is something that had to happen. Africa has relied a lot on aid for everything. $2.7 trillion has been spent on aid in Africa over the last 30 years. What are the results? The results have been very, very negative to most African countries.

Wherever we've seen so much aid presented to African governments and African communities, the worst the governments have performed, a small segment have profited, and what have we gotten out of aid? We've gotten that at the expense of free markets. We've gotten that at the expense of increasing government waste. We've gotten that where you've seen the business has not been able to move because we've always said we are relying on handouts and begging from Western countries.

So, I actually think they're doing us a favour because right now we would understand one thing. Superman is not coming, Batman is not coming, Wakanda Forever is a good movie, but the Black Panther is not coming. We would have to do what the Asians did, like in China and India or South Korea or Taiwan, when they cut aid, they looked inward and did it by themselves.

We need to get intra-Africa free trade moving fast, cut down tariffs and customs and all these duties that blockage aid, deal with our visa issues, and move with a lot of trade within Africa. We need to capitalize on that 1.4 billion population in African trade within ourselves. We will make so much money; we will be giving aid to others and not continue this perpetual nature of begging for aid. So, it's, it's a wake-up call for Africa, and we need to heed this call and change how we're doing things.

You're saying, in essence, this is the moment of truth for the African continent. What should be Africa's response to the dwindling foreign aid?

NJ Ayuk: We're not moving as fast as we need to move, and we need to be moving fast. We need to have that fierce urgency now. We need to go on a super drive. I don't think it is something that we need to be happy with, that a country at war like Ukraine is feeding Africa and we have to go beg for food from them when we have abundant gas in Africa.

We could turn that into urea, ammonia, NPK, and fertilizer plants, and drive up agriculture in Africa so we don't need to beg for food. And on this same topic of aid, the question you've got to ask yourself is that when we receive U.S. aid and food, who really benefits? It's the farmer in the Midwest in Iowa.

It's the American farmer that benefits more than the African farmer because the African farmer is being priced out of the market because this food is donated for free. So, we kill local and cultural bases, and even agricultural ministries put a chokehold on the local farmers. But we need to be able to drive up homegrown, get natural gas, and really drive up Africa.

So that is the kind of stuff that would make us start looking at policies that look at it. But the real question you've got to ask yourself is, when we get this aid, you know what happens? Our development banks, our local banks start getting this because they manage some of this aid money, start saying we can't finance fossil fuels, we can't finance gas projects. So even African money cannot develop Africa or finance Africa, because we have this restriction being put on us.

What this aid stoppage means is that it is taking those restrictions out, and we're just going to move with drill, baby drill, and produce every drop of hydrocarbons we can find to better our people. So, we thank them for taking this aid and the restrictions away.

Speaking specifically, NJ, to the report on the termination of the Power Africa initiative by the new administration in Washington, what's your take on that development?

NJ Ayuk: Power Africa was a failure from day one because what happened with Power Africa is that they spent so much money doing lectures and workshops across Africa, they did visibility studies, but they ignored one critical component of Africa, natural gas.

The ability that Power Africa could refuse to touch on any kind of gas projects when it comes to gas to power, and using gas to power all across Africa, was a failure because Power Africa relied on driving up just renewables across the continent. So, ask yourself this, it was put there in 2015, two years, 2025, what are the numbers of people that have come out of energy poverty through Power Africa? Very, very minor.

The majority of the money stayed with U.S. contractors and professional service firms like Deloitte and everything else.
When has Deloitte ever built anything when it comes to delivering projects? Then you have these consultants who made so much money off the back of African countries. So, it was a big waste. Africans should not fall for this anymore.

Power Africa could have been good if it channeled itself to natural gas development and used American technology or American skill set, and you would have been able to drive up. Imagine if Power Africa looked at a country like Nigeria.

If you use the gas that has been filled in Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, and Congo Brazzaville, if you look at all that gas flaring, capture that gas through Power Africa initiatives, and transform that gas into power projects, we would electrify the entire Africa. That was a big mistake from them, and now we're seeing the results of that.

How should Africa seize the momentum of President Trump's regime of drill, baby, drill?

NJ Ayuk: We've been given extra time on this game. We've been told that. We've just been given some time to buy in, and that's why we as Africans must move. We must move fast. We must sign, baby, sign, and sign those deals.

It shouldn't take so long to approve field development programs, be it the Coral North in Mozambique or other projects that are waiting in the office of bureaucrats in Nigeria, South Africa, Namibia or Angola. We should move fast in signing deals. We should move fast in driving up our fossil fuels and gas projects and produce and develop our continent.

But I think BP is speaking to the markets. They are reacting to market realities. Demand, when you look at what you saw with outlooks coming out of VTOL, the African Energy Chamber, we're looking at outlooks coming from various well-reputed organizations, it's showing that oil demand is going to continue to be around 100 to 120 million barrels even by 2050.

It's not reducing. It's going to reduce in OECD countries, but it's going to go right up in emerging countries and the developing world. There's going to be more demand. So, we need to move fast. We need to use this time to drive up our production, because at the end of the day, what is going to shape is that it's going to be about who is producing and who is buying and whose natural gas or oil is going to be in the market.

We want to be that continent where its natural gas and oil are going to be in the market, where we can export, but we can also use domestically to grow our economies. That's why we need to start planning now. The delays that we've seen across Africa with licenses, need to stop. We need to stop.

We need to change that. We need to look at our fiscals and improve those fiscals to be more attractive and more bankable. We need to cut down red tape and be able to drive investors coming in, we move fast today, and we drive up Africa's production because there is no need to keep these delays. It's not helping us. So,

If we look back into the electricity or power space, what type of funding, investments and global partnerships can help Africa cut back on its energy poverty in the short to medium term?

NJ Ayuk: It's not enough. I think one of the key things, we have to be very careful with this funding initiative. Remember the $100 billion for climate funds? Those initiatives were created, but never come. Every two, or three years, the AFDB and others are saying, we're going for $300 billion. We're going for $40 billion. It never happens, and they renew these pledges and all of that. We need to stop it.

We need to go right at it because everyday people across the country are waiting. They are asking that all these big meetings you have and pledges and whatever, we're not seeing the results. We're seeing bureaucrats taking per diems, sitting in fancy hotels and having these conversations when more people are being stuck in energy poverty, and that is something that we have to look at.

We have to start looking. I think the idea of going in and saying, we're going to wait on the World Bank and the IMF because they're going to focus on renewables only, that just becomes the same problem you have with Power Africa. Europe and North America, they're going for coal. They're going for gas. They're going for everything to drive up the economy. Our partnerships should be partnerships that go for all of the above energy resources because all of the above energy requires us to use coal in some stages, some clean coal.

There's a lot of beautiful clean coal across Africa, even in Nigeria, in Enugu State. Very beautiful coal that you can really use and light up the country and industrialize the country, and your greenhouse gas emissions are going to be very low. Same in South Africa, Mozambique and Tanzania. Going to natural gas and really go back there and fund it with World Bank money and really drive that up.

It's going to take care of Europe, but it's also going to take care of Africa, and we are going to get out of this energy poverty, and our food crisis is going to be solved immediately. To have this ideological version of things and saying, if it's not solar or it's not wind, then we shouldn't do it, but the sun wouldn't shine forever.

The wind wouldn't blow forever. You might need natural gas forever, so let's get with the reality and let's bring some pragmatic, common-sense approach to this discussion and how we invest in it. We need to be bankable. Banks should make decisions based on the bankability of projects, not ideological narratives being pushed from Western countries and saying that that's how it needs to go.

We need to reject this, and I think that with these aid cuts that we're seeing, it's time for us to have policies that make Africa bankable by using all of the above energy sources to drive up Africa. Those partners should come with markets and investors and companies, not aid organizations and the World Bank pushing down those anti-business policies to us.

What will be the key message of the African Energy Chamber and other speakers at your Invest Africa Energy Forum in Paris this year?

NJ Ayuk: It's going to be about deals. It's going to be about really getting – a lot of transactions I've been working on is going to take place in Paris. I'm excited about Paris. I already got my ticket. Vivre la France, j’arrive, and we are going to make something so beautiful in Paris. Some of the biggest companies, Parenco, Trident Energy, a lot of the IOCs and even Middle Eastern companies I met on my recent trip to Saudi Arabia, are going to be in Paris, but there's going to be a lot of deal signings.

It's going to be a lot of engagements upstream, but also renewables and all of that. A lot of African leadership is going to be in Paris. We're going to go down the Paris Declaration to see about financing fossil fuels. But then Paris sets up into some place very special. The big road to Cape Town. We are going to be heading from Paris to nowhere else but Cape Town, where we're going to welcome G20 leaders.

There's going to be this big G20 Energy Forum with investments put at Africa Energy Week in Cape Town. Very beautiful thing. I mean, you could love or hate me, but you know I'm going to put on a beautiful show in Cape Town. It's going to be so, so great.