Adetayo Bamiduro is co-founder of Metro Xpress Africa (MAX), a mobility access start-up that provides affordable vehicle financing which is also leading the transition to environmental-friendly mobility through the deployment of electric vehicles, charging infrastructure, and batteries. He explains to PAUL OMOROGBE why despite the significant funding electric mobility startups have received in recent times there is yet to be a widespread deployment of electric vehicles on the streets.
There has been a lot of news about funding going into electric mobility startups. However, we are yet to see a massive deployment of electric vehicles. Why?
For electric mobility in Nigeria and the rest of Africa, there has been increasing funding. MAX raised funding at the end of 2021, alongside a few other companies that are driving the energy transition. We announced $31 million in total. And there are a few other companies that raised significant funding as well in the electric mobility space. So it is great news really. Funding is worth celebrating just because without it there is only so much you can do, especially when you are trying to deploy new technology. You can’t go to China and ask them to give you electric vehicles on credit; you can’t go to battery suppliers and ask them to give you batteries on credit, especially when you tell them you are from Africa, that’s not going to happen!
So you need funding to buy some of the components you need. For us, local manufacturing is a priority – manufacturing vehicles locally has always been a priority for us! But the way manufacturing works, you need to source parts, inputs, from different parts of the world and you need funding to do that.
Now the question on people’s lips is when are you going to start seeing electric vehicles everywhere? Let’s look at gas engines because when you look at mobility, the fundamental driver is energy!
Up until the recent past, that energy source has been largely fossil fuels – petrol and diesel. There are cars everywhere because there are petrol stations everywhere. If there are no petrol or diesel stations everywhere there will not be cars everywhere.
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You can’t store petrol or diesel in your homes unless you want to take a massive risk.
So the problem with electric vehicles is that before you have them everywhere, what you need to have everywhere are charging stations and access to batteries.
And I am sure you know petrol stations didn’t appear everywhere overnight. It took years, engineering and design. For electric vehicles to become mainstream you need distributed energy, and you also need battery swapping and battery charging stations everywhere. And that’s a harder problem to solve than designing electric vehicles. You can build electric vehicles in a factory and push out thousands in a day. What you can’t do overnight is to set up charging stations everywhere. That’s where the heavy-lifting is and that’s where we are putting a lot of work right now – to make sure that there are enough charging stations to enable us to deploy enough electric vehicles at scale.
What do you need for that to happen?
It is very simple. You need to deploy a lot of batteries and you need to make sure there is reliable electricity at every charging station.
Is this something for investors to do or is it for the government?
The government needs to support this. If you look at what Egypt has done, the Egyptian government has made a lot of progress and is working with private sector leaders to scale up charging station networks. The same thing needs to be done in every country that wants to transit. So the Nigerian government needs to prioritise putting in place tax breaks, regulatory support, even legislation to for example mandate say every petrol station to carve out a battery swapping section in their stations for a battery operator. So the government has a significant role to help accelerate the rapid growth of charging stations to support electric vehicle deployment. That’s the government’s role!
Critics say that the energy transition is another form of colonialism because Africa has to depend on renewable energy technologies from the West, Europe and China. What do you say to that?
There is a debate around that. Norway has lots of oil, but the countries that are moving away from fossil fuel are not moving away because they have run out of their own oil. Moving away from oil to renewable energy is a global movement. It is not an imperialist idea. So it is not about one country dominating the other. And it is not like the developed countries have said that developing countries must buy batteries from certain countries. It can be their own batteries. What stops you from building your own batteries? China is a developing country and India is a developing country as well. India has millions of poor people, but India is making its own batteries and developing its own electric vehicles. So nobody is telling India you have to come and buy Tesla or buy vehicles from Germany.
So from my view, it is not an imperialist agenda. It is a crisis that the entire planet is facing, and every country has to take responsibility and do its own part.
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