Law. Energy. Justice: The conversation we’re not having

When people ask what drew me to the intersection of law, energy, and justice, I often tell them there was no dramatic moment or lightning-bolt revelation. It was more of a slow awakening, the kind that grows louder the more you begin to understand the world around you. Growing up in Nigeria, energy injustice was not an academic theory; it was a daily reality. Like I often say, you could map privilege by who had light and who didn’t. But the turning point came later, during my early legal work on energy governance and, even more sharply, when I began engaging with Indigenous rights in Canada. On two different continents, I saw the same pattern: communities closest to the resource were often the farthest from the benefit.

That was when it became clear to me that energy is not just a sector. It is a story, one about power, land, identity, and dignity. For Indigenous communities especially, land is not a negotiable asset; it is the root of who they are. Take away the land, and you have stripped away identity itself. And law, whether we admit it or not, is the narrator of that story. Once I understood that, separating law, energy, and justice became impossible. They sit inside one struggle.

Language is often where that struggle begins. Words decide legitimacy long before any court does. If you call a pipeline a “national interest project,” the moral ground has already shifted. If you reduce a community’s resistance to “consultation fatigue,” you flatten real trauma into administrative inconvenience. Even in African countries, when energy development is framed strictly as an economic opportunity, we silence the human and environmental costs that never make it into glossy policy documents. Law follows the language we reward. And when the dominant vocabulary is purely technical, royalties, megawatts, barrels per day, justice quietly disappears from the conversation. People get left behind not only because of policy choices but because their suffering does not fit the vocabulary of development.

The failure of legal systems begins at the point of definition. Most laws treat energy as a commodity before they treat it as a right, and that single choice shapes everything else. If energy is a commodity, the law regulates profit and efficiency. If energy is a right, the law regulates dignity and access. This is why Indigenous communities in Canada and marginalized communities across Africa remain underserved. The system measures progress in dollars, not in whether a child can study at night or whether a community maintains control over its land.

This failure also shows up in participation. In theory, consultation is meant to uphold fairness. In practice, it is often a procedural checkbox, not an ethical commitment. Too many communities are given symbolic seats at the table or none at all. Courts are then asked to interpret rules written without the people most affected. The structure looks polite, but the outcome is often quietly violent.

For energy law to truly reflect fairness, rights, and dignity, we need courage from policymakers to admit that the current frameworks are insufficient. We must begin with a new premise: energy is a social determinant of life opportunities. That means embedding rights-based language into legislation, not relegating it to footnotes or policy guidelines. It means treating land, culture, and identity as non-negotiable variables, not stakeholder afterthoughts.

Fairness also requires shifting real power. Communities need bargaining authority, not ceremonial invitations. It means rewriting procurement rules, redesigning benefit agreements, and recognizing Indigenous and local governance systems as legitimate legal structures, not cultural accessories to be acknowledged only when convenient. Justice cannot be symbolic; it must be enforceable.

When I imagine the future of African energy law, I see a continent standing at a crossroads. We will either replicate the inequalities of the fossil fuel era in the clean energy era, or we will redefine what justice looks like for a new generation. The future I imagine is unapologetically people-centred, where community ownership models, Indigenous governance, youth leadership, and gender justice are foundational, not decorative. But that future will not arrive accidentally.

It requires leaders who are not intimidated by complexity, policymakers who understand that Africa’s energy transition is not only technical but political, cultural, and moral. It requires lawyers who recognize that the law is never neutral; it always takes a side. And so, the question remains: in this defining moment, will we choose courage over convenience?

.Okibe is a climate and energy policy specialist, attorney, and doctoral researcher currently based in Canada.

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