Enhancing the Governance of Africa’s Oil Sector

by Douglas Yates
SAIIA Occasional Paper, No 51, November 2009
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Governance of Africa’s Resources Programme

This paper evaluates several important international governance initiatives in the African oil sector, including the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, Publish What You Pay, Transparency International and Global Witness.  What are the lessons we can learn from their successes and failures? Is there really a resource curse? Why does it hit some countries harder than others? Case studies of eight African oil-rent-dependent states (Angola, Cameroon, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Nigeria and Sudan) are tabulated for comparative analysis. These are followed by several two variable correlations of oil-rent dependency (independent variable), which analyse poverty, corruption, governance and violence (dependent variables). In conclusion, various moral lessons are drawn concerning the present-day realities of the oil-governance initiatives.

SAIIA sincerely thanks those who acted as peer reviewers for this paper.