Letter: Africa can decarbonise, but it must first decolonise its economy

One thing is missing from David Pilling’s “Can Africa grow without fossil fuels?” (The Big Read, June 2), namely a discourse about the underlying neocolonial model of economic development that assumes that we can somehow decarbonise a system that hasn’t been decolonised yet.

Post-colonial Africa suffers from three structural deficiencies: the lack of food sovereignty, energy sovereignty and high value-added manufacturing. These produce structural trade deficits, which in turn cause currency depreciation that makes all imports more expensive (imported inflation). The band-aid solution forces African governments to artificially stabilise their exchange rates by issuing more dollar- and euro-denominated debt. Hence Africa’s external debt trap.