Governance, Gender and no Guarantees in Africa’s Oil-Rich States

Jul 19, 2015 | Celeste Hicks and Laura Seay
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The discovery of oil in Chad in 1969 did not yield many immediate benefits for a population that would soon be wracked by civil war, but hopes were high by the late 1990s. Chad had largely stabilized, and a new, World Bank-backed project to build a pipeline through Cameroon to the Atlantic Ocean coast was touted as a model for socially and environmentally responsible oil exploitation in developing countries. Oil began flowing through the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline in 2003, but 12 years later, it is clear that the plan was largely a failure. Far from using oil revenues to benefit civilians by building and maintaining better public services, corruption and mismanagement plagued the project, leaving already-wealthy public officials as the biggest beneficiaries of a very expensive international development plan. Chad, meanwhile, seems to be just another case study in a long list of the resource-cursed weak countries in which leaders rely on natural-resource revenues to stay in power, thus avoiding creating the kinds of democratic, accountable institutions needed to strengthen the state and stop corruption. Are Chad and other oil-rich African states like Nigeria or Equatorial Guinea really “resource-cursed?”  Are democratic political institutions doomed if oil is discovered in a weak state? Will women ever play an equal role in Africa’s oil industries? Freelance journalist Celeste Hicks explores Chad’s oil exploitation efforts and the broader phenomenon of post-Cold War oil exploration in Africa in her new book, “Africa’s New Oil: Power, Pipelines, and Future Fortunes.” We chat about what she learned in the following Q&A: