From the Secretary’s Corner

There is a particular meaning in returning to the place where something began. A year ago, in Accra, the heads of seven African petroleum regulators put their names to a charter and, in doing so, brought the African Petroleum Regulators Forum into being. This September, we returned to Accra, no longer to establish the Forum, but to progress it’s agenda. The distance between those two visits, from founding to functioning, is the story of the year we have just lived, and it is what our days in Accra were about.

AFRIPERF exists because of a simple, stubborn fact: for too long, Africa’s petroleum wealth has been governed in fragments. Each nation has negotiated alone. Each regulator has learned the same hard lessons in isolation, and often at the same cost. Investors have met a different rulebook at every border, and the continent has too often spoken about its own resources in a chorus of separate voices, or been spoken about while absent from the room. The Forum is, at its heart, the decision to stop doing this. Initiated by seven regulators, and more, choosing to stand together. One voice. One standard.

Our first day in Accra was for the Executive Committee, which met on 2 September at the Kempinski Hotel Gold Coast City under the chairmanship of Mrs. Oritsemeyiwa Eyesan, Commission Chief Executive of the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission. This is the governing heart of the Forum, the room in which member states review the year behind us, weigh the decisions before us, and set the direction ahead. It is unglamorous work, the careful business of turning shared intention into work plans, mandates and timelines. Yet it is precisely this work that separates an aspiration from an institution. A year ago we held a signed charter; in Accra we had a Forum meeting to chart a way forward for the Forum, and taking that responsibility seriously.

On the 3 September, we convened the Business-to-Government Dialogue. If there is one misunderstanding about regulation I would most like to correct, it is the belief that the regulator and the industry sit on opposite sides of a wall. They do not. Good regulation is not a barrier to investment; it is the very thing that makes serious investment possible. Capital seeks certainty. Communities need that capital to become development. Governments need both. The Dialogue brought these interests into a single room, not to paper over genuine tensions, but to reason through them honestly. A Forum confident enough to invite industry to the table is a Forum that understands its own purpose.

Our final engagement looked furthest ahead. On 3 and 4 September, at the Mövenpick Hotel, AFRIPERF joined the Oil and Gas Decarbonisation Charter, the industry-wide initiative launched at COP28, to convene a workshop on regulation for sustainable petroleum development in Africa. Here we confronted the question our generation of regulators cannot avoid: how does a continent that still needs to develop its hydrocarbons do so responsibly, in a warming world? Africa will not accept the false choice between energy poverty and environmental care. We intend to develop our resources, and to do so cleanly, wisely and on terms we set ourselves. Sound regulation is how a just and orderly transition is written into law rather than merely wished for.

None of what Accra represented would have been possible without the leadership of our Chairperson. Building on the progress achieved by her predecessor, since Mrs. Eyesan assumed the chair, the Forum has moved with a clarity of purpose and a momentum that a young institution acquires only when someone insists upon it. She has given AFRIPERF direction where an organisation of its age can so easily drift, held us to the discipline of delivery rather than mere declaration, and lent the Forum the weight and credibility of her own standing as a serving national regulator. The meetings convened in Accra, the partnerships opened there, and the growing confidence with which the Forum now speaks are, in large measure, the fruit of her stewardship and the tireless support from other heads of Regulatory bodies within Africa who shares the same passion. With this collaboration AFRIPERF has moved from a charter that had been signed to an institution that is genuinely being built.

AFRIPERF began with seven founding regulators drawn from across the continent, from Nigeria to Sudan, from Madagascar to The Gambia, each of which chose to join its strength to the others’, in the conviction that we regulate better together than alone. That is no small decision for any national authority, and the Forum belongs, first and foremost, to the countries and the regulators who made it. Every standard we harmonise, every position we carry into the world, every gain we record is theirs as much as every unit and committee of the Forum. To the regulators across Africa who are building this institution with us, those already at the table, and those advancing towards ratification, the Forum is, and will remain, your own. Our ambition was never seven members, but a continent.

What, then, lies on the road ahead? A great deal, and little of it quick. We are working towards harmonised standards, so that a company operating across African jurisdictions meets one coherent framework rather than a dozen contradictory ones. We are building the capacity of our member regulators, so that regulatory strength is raised collectively and no authority is left behind. We are strengthening a Secretariat able to serve members not once a year, but every day. And we are pressing towards a genuinely unified African presence in the global energy conversation, where the decisions that shape Africa’s resources are taken with Africa firmly in the room.

We left Accra with the conviction we arrived with, only deeper: that Africa’s regulators are stronger together than apart, and that we have chosen, deliberately, to keep walking together. To our members, our partners, and the industry we regulate, the invitation stands — walk with us.