Seriti Green’s Chabisi Motloung on the careers waiting for young Africans in renewables
Four months ago Chabisi Motloung was a smelting man. Now he is Chief Operating Officer of a renewable energy company, and his message to the young people at the Youth Energy Summit was that the same move is open to them. Speaking to ENN at the Africa Energy Forum, the Seriti Green COO made the case that the energy transition is where the opportunities, and the careers, now sit.
The summit closed the conference on Youth Day, marking the anniversary of 16 June 1976, and Motloung said the timing made it all the more meaningful. The aim was to show young people the openings that exist in renewables, from wind and solar to the wider African ambition of integrating electricity systems across the continent. He spoke from his own experience. After a career in smelting, an industry he describes as having all but disappeared, he chose to redefine himself rather than mourn what was going. The lesson he draws for young people is not to stay stagnant, to keep pace with where the world is heading and position themselves for what comes next.
That personal pivot connects to how Seriti Green builds its workforce. The company’s first wind farm is in Mpumalanga, and the next is around a thousand kilometres away, so the turbine skills do not yet exist locally. Of the roughly eighty-six people in the team, he said, about ninety per cent have come from outside renewables. For Motloung, converting the coal skills abundant in the province into renewable ones is a moral obligation as much as a practical one, because renewables are where these workers’ futures lie, and the company is rolling out a whole fleet of wind farms that will need them.
Asked what would most help young Africans build careers in the sector, Motloung pointed to the scale of the problem still to be solved. Some 600 million people across the continent live without electricity, and in that gap he sees the opportunity, the space to build companies that widen access and bring more people onto power. Opportunities will not come knocking, he said. Young people need to go out and find them, and be problem-solvers in a continent with no shortage of problems worth solving.
Tying it to the forum’s industrialisation theme, Motloung said this generation carries a real weight on its shoulders. Africa has woken up to the need to add value to the minerals it mines rather than simply exporting them raw, and that beneficiation will take electricity, a great deal of it. The continent has to decide whether it will be a consumer or a producer. The grid is the challenge that sits underneath that choice. South Africa’s network is good but needs expanding, he said, and beyond expansion lies the bigger ambition of interconnecting with neighbouring countries towards a single African grid. That, in his words, is a dream this generation needs to own.
