A $5 billion bank for oil and gas projects now exists, announced in Abuja on October 31, 2026, one day ago. The African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) and the African Petroleum Producers' Organisation (APPO) call it the Africa Energy Bank (AEB). Its authorised capital is $5 billion. Its stated purpose is to bridge a continental energy financing gap, as traditional lenders pull money out of fossil fuels.
Who Has the Power
The inaugural general assembly handed out the jobs before anything else. Helmy Ghazi was appointed the bank's inaugural president, and a first Board of Directors was formed. According to the announcement, that board draws on "the public and private sectors, alongside leading policy institutions from across the continent." Nobody in the announcement says who chose them, or whether anyone outside the room had a say.
The bank describes itself as an "independent, supranational pan-African financial institution." Its money will come from "governments, national oil companies, financial institutions and private investors." That's the funding list. Governments, state oil firms, banks and private capital. Communities living beside the wells, pipelines and refineries aren't on it.
Who Pays for the Plan
The bank's mandate covers the whole fossil chain: exploration and production, transportation, processing, refining and distribution. It's pitched as strengthening "Africa's productive capacity," cutting dependence on imported petroleum products and promoting intra-African trade in energy goods. The mandate also seeks to make sure development and financing of the continent's energy resources are "increasingly shaped by African governments, institutions and investors."
Read that last phrase again. Governments, institutions, investors. The word "people" doesn't appear. Ownership gets passed from foreign lenders to a local layer of the same hierarchy, and it's sold as liberation.
The need is real enough. The announcement puts Africa's energy investment needs at $200 billion. Its own justification: reliable, affordable energy is "essential to accelerating industrial growth" and to exploiting emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, which "will require significant investments in energy generation and transmission." So the demand being served is industrial growth and the data centers of the AI economy. The bank talks about a "just energy transition" reflecting "the continent's development priorities." Who sets those priorities? The people on the board.
What They're Calling "Development"
Traditional lenders are reducing their exposure to fossil fuels, the announcement says, even as oil and gas stay central to the continent's energy systems. The gap those lenders leave behind is now being filled by another pool of institutional money, with the same product and a new flag on it.
Notice what's missing from the whole announcement. There's no mention of community consent, local ownership, or any mechanism for the people living near these projects to refuse them. There's no word on who bears the risk if a project fails, or whose land and water it runs through. The documents speak only to capital, mandates and appointments.
People across the continent already know how to build energy for themselves. Neighbourhoods and villages that run their own power, share what they generate and decide together how it's used don't need a $5 billion institution with a president and a board to tell them it's coming. That's the alternative this launch is designed to crowd out: energy that answers to the people using it, not to shareholders and ministries.
The bank has its president, its board and its $5 billion. The communities it will build on have yet to be asked.
- africa energy bank
- afreximbank
- energy financing
- fossil fuels
- energy transition
- helmy ghazi
- abuja