This article’s aim is to revisit the concept of replacement equivalent, which is still a work in progress, concerning oil and gas economies in Africa; what does life after oil and gas look like?

The concept’s premise is that single-cause climate activism is bound to fail if the activists seek results that are puritanical in nature – trying to squeeze out of oil and gas economies situations that are unfeasible, given the level of dependence on fossil fuels, which are at the heart of these economies. Single-cause ambitions – which speak to the needs of global climate movements – are not tailored, and neither do they have the patience to resolve economic transition questions. They want pyrrhic victories.

This is true of causes funded from outside the continent. Such patronised causes will immediately flag questions of whose interests are being served by global climate movements, especially if such patrons live in countries that are importers of oil and gas, lending a lie to advocacy groups’ push to have producers keep their oil and gas in the hole.

Fossil-fuel economies with a long history of path dependence exist the way they are as a result of a symbiotic relation between producers and buyers. Untangling these relationships is not something that will come from moral persuasion or legal actions.

In any case, one should not romanticise the idea that extractive industries are particularly helpful to the prospect of a better economic future for host countries’ people – extractive industries are notorious for being labour, community and environmentally unfriendly. Yet we have this conundrum: liberation from greenhouse-gas emissions is not the same as economic liberation.

This behoves a deeper understanding of fossil-dependent economies.

No country is an island, and countries that are dependent on exports of their natural resources have to engage with a complex world order these days. New investment pathways can foster – by necessity or force – the need to be more responsive to sources of new capital. This is one of the reasons country platforms or investment platforms can be useful. They can at least begin the process of catalysing economic dynamism for a phase-down or phase-out of fossil fuels into new economic sectors.

By replacement equivalent, the share and value of a specific extractive industry- dependent economy must be replaced with something more equivalent, something that further advances the objectives of economic resilience and diversification that was not achievable under the current dispensation of path dependence.

The key to Africa’s prosperity is not its natural resources, but its people. Yet the people must advance from resource dependence to dependence on their talent and the application of knowledge and technology in new sectors. Growth is not the end, but a necessary means to raise national and household income levels. This is also key to these countries’ ability to finance long-term infrastructure investments, drawing on domestic rather than international savings.

It is not impossible for African countries to acquire the means to improve their GDP per capita. In 1980, China’s GDP per capita was only $193 – lower than Bangladesh’s, Chad’s and Malawi's – and by 2012 China’s GDP per capita had grown thirtyfold to $6 091. To get there, it had to radically restructure its economy, bringing the whole of society along.

Yeun Yeun Ang notes in her book, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, that China did not wait for all basic conditions, such as governance, to be settled before making economic progress. It attracted investment and improved governance in parallel, bucking Western assumptions that better governance must precede investment. The book identifies three things that helped China to make economic progress. First, it unleashed dynamism through inward investment and ensured that capital accumulation shifted towards an equilibrium of positive wealth creation. Second, weaker institutions were more attuned to the need for change than might have been the case with strong institutions. And third, local and national economic strategies had to adapt to increased investment from foreign or domestic sources alike.

Even in resource-dependent countries, it is not that the limits of such dependencies are poorly understood. If you are an oil and gas economy that is purely extractive, with minimal value-add, you will certainly know that the boom-and-bust cycles of trade in oil and gas commodities are not great anchors for economic success.

The replacement-equivalent debate can be extended to all extractive economies – not just oil and gas. Climate realities, including global warming, are all being felt in Zambia, where environmental stress and commodity dependencies are butting heads in the wrong way. These crises are also prompting a renewal of conversations about economic diversification and energy security.

There is a better case to be made, and it does not come from the universe of climate change or green transitions – but rather through answering basic questions about the more appropriate investments extractive- dependent economies need to pursue to ensure economic diversification and resilience.

In seeking answers to this broader challenge of investment gaps and economic growth, a more fitting context can be established for the appropriate role of climate solutions in meeting some of those gaps. It is, in any case, a given in this day and age that we must embody climate objectives in all economies. So, why belabor the point?

It has been argued here that green transitions are not useful when they concern themselves only with the replacement of dirty electrons with clean ones. The question is not simply about the energy source, but grasping the fact that affordable energy is a key input and must be put to work for deepening economic diversification. In the replacement- equivalent model, we have to take into account more than one set of climate and development objectives. Equivalency dictates that what is new must be durable, long-lasting and of greater value than the old.