(AfriquesPlus) - Writing on August 27, 2026, Linda Mabhena-Olagunju — founder and CEO of the South African wind and gas developer DLO Energy Resources Group — pushes back on a narrower diagnosis offered weeks earlier by economist Rabah Arezki in the Financial Times (July 22, 2026), who attributed Africa's renewable-energy cost premium mainly to sovereign risk, currency mismatch, and market illiquidity. Real as those constraints are, Mabhena-Olagunju argues they sidestep a more basic question: who actually owns the power plants being built. She traces the answer to three compounding gaps that no amount of cheap financing, on its own, can fix.
The first sits far upstream of any financing decision, in the unglamorous work of procurement design, permitting, grid studies, and power-purchase-agreement negotiation, a state-capacity problem before it is ever a capital-markets one. She notes that all the dedicated project-preparation funding accumulated across Africa's development finance institutions over more than a decade totals roughly $1 billion, against an annual financing gap she puts at $130 billion to $170 billion, and that such grants typically take twelve to eighteen months to disburse, well past the point when a bidding round has already closed. Even where procurement worked, as in South Africa's flagship renewable program, it still hasn't produced a substantial pool of local developers able to compete with international power producers. Without one, she warns, "Africa is not building an energy sector. It is warehousing one for someone else."
The second gap, in her account, is where ownership is genuinely decided — not at financial close, but earlier, when a developer must post bid bonds and preferred-bidder guarantees from its own balance sheet, at full risk, with no guarantee the project ever proceeds. Development finance institutions that back early-stage projects typically cover only half the development costs, and venture capital has largely avoided infrastructure to chase software instead — missing, in her words, that "capital that won't fund the power behind the compute is betting against its own thesis." Whoever can absorb that early risk sets the eventual ownership table; local developers, unable to carry it, are usually added later at minority stakes to satisfy a local-content requirement rather than because they originated the deal.
The third gap, she writes, survives even where local ownership requirements are met on paper: bid evaluation criteria across the continent's independent-power-producer programs reward bankability and track record in ways that still favor established foreign equipment makers and contractors, so that a project can satisfy its local-equity quota while importing nearly every panel, turbine, and skilled engineering hour behind it. "Ownership and procurement are two separate places African value leaks out of the same projects," she argues, and only one of them shows up on the cap table.
Mabhena-Olagunju also disputes treating Africa's renewable-finance problem as one continent-wide story. South Africa's Public Investment Corporation alone manages more than 3 trillion rand in assets and invests directly in infrastructure through its own funds, evidence, she writes, that at least one African market already has the capital depth the cost-of-capital narrative assumes is missing everywhere. Morocco, Egypt, and Kenya each bring their own capital markets, institutional investors, and procurement track records, and each needs its own diagnosis rather than a single financing fix. Guarantees and blended finance remain necessary, she concludes, but only alongside procurement reform and early-stage development capital, the combination, she argues, that would let Africans carry the early risk and keep the equity that concessional finance was meant to protect, recycling returns into the next project instead of repatriating them abroad.
