Carbon tax will cost Africa dearly

It’s not often that, when reading President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Monday “letter to the nation”, we do anything except stifle yawns.

Our leader is the King of Blah-Blah-Blah. Yet, yesterday, on his return from the COP28 climate change conference, his weekly missive made some good points.

Primary among them was how Africa – and, indeed the entire developing world – was being expected to implement sweeping energy transition programmes by those countries whose own development was the cause of global warming in the first place.

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They may be committing some financial incentives – although soft loans are not direct aid, let’s not forget – to making our Just Energy Transition a reality…

But, at the same time, the Europeans, particularly, are introducing a “carbon border tax” which will be levied on imports based on how much carbon dioxide is produced during their growing or manufacturing process.

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That will make our exports more expensive – and uncompetitive – because we are an economy still driven by fossil fuels. Nobody wants to make allowances for that.

Sticking to the imposed climate requirements of the north will slow down progress in the developing world. The developed countries don’t care about that.

This has happened before – it was called colonialism then.