Africa is eyed by
imperialism as being simultaneously very rich (in
natural resources) and extremely poor (in
peoples living standard), thereby releasing
surpluses to be exported to the world market,
satisfying the egotism of rich countries and
feeding the profits of trans-national
corporations, compromising the future
industrialization of the continent at the expense
of present level of living of
Africans. I
Africa supports a population of about 900
million people, living in about 50 countries,
many of which are somewhat artificial
constructions inherited from the European
colonial administrations set up in the XIX
century.
The social structure of the Continent is one
of extremes, from deprived populations, many
facing famine, disease and war, to the wealthy
elites and war lords supported by colonial or
neo-colonial economic or military connections,
whose income they derive from the exploitation of
natural resources from which huge profits are
extracted by trans-national corporations.
Africa is a prime producer of raw minerals of
great industrial importance. To name just a few
of those with the greatest economic and
technological value and their producers:
hydrocarbons (in Libya, Nigeria, Algeria and
Angola); diamonds (in Botswana, R.D. Congo, R.
South Africa and Angola); gold (R South Africa,
Ghana, Mali, Tanzania); platinum group metals (R.
South Africa); tantalum and niobium (R. South
Africa, Mozambique, Rwanda); uranium (Niger,
Namibia); phosphate (Morocco, R. South Africa,
Tunisia); copper (Zambia, R. South Africa, R.D.
Congo, Botswana).
II
Africa holds about one tenth of the
worlds reserves of petroleum and natural
gas and is currently delivering nearly one tenth
of the worlds annual production. The past
and forecast production of conventional oil in
the African continent add up to an ultimate oil
production estimated of nearly 180 Gb (billion
barrels)of which nearly half has been
produced up to nowleaving the remaining
half to be extracted in the future. The four
principal producers are Libya, Nigeria, Algeria
and Angola, which are all members of OPEC,
together holding more than 80% of the estimated
future production of the continent. Other
producers, in decreasing order of shares, are
Egypt, Gabon, Congo, Sudan, Tunisia, Chad
and Cameron.
Production commenced in the 1930s and grew
rapidly in the 1960s as major fields in Libya
came on stream. Production was then reinforced by
Nigeria and Algeria, supplemented by smaller
producers, in the 1970s. There was an overall
early peak of production in 1979 of 6.7 Mb/day
(million barrels a day), then production fell
sharply in the wake of the second oil shock, due
to OPEC quota constraints, before recovering and
attaining an overall peak of 7.8 Mb/day in 2006.
Future production is expected to decline at about
3% a year, to about half that level by 2025.
Africa also holds substantial additional
deepwater resources in the Guinea Gulf,
especially off the coasts of Angola and Nigeria,
which are at an early stage of depletion. This
production is expected to grow rapidly to peak
around 2012 at 4 Mb/day, and decline steeply
afterwards to near exhaustion by 2030.
Africa also holds substantial natural gas
deposits in Algeria, Nigeria, Egypt and Lybia,
plus some minor reservoirs elsewhere. Total gas
reserves are equivalent to about 46 Gb, the
larger in Algeria, which currently produces at a
rate of 560 Mb/year. The related production from
gas liquefaction plants (LNG) is expected to
increase from about 500 kb/day in 2005 to attain
a plateau of about 1.3 Mb/day from 2020 onwards.
Taken together, the total production of all
liquids (conventional and deepwater oil and
liquefied natural gas) is expected to reach a
peak of about 12 Mb/day around 2012, but then
fall rapidly to about half that level by 2025.
As to oil consumption, it has grown five-fold
from 530 kb/day in 1965 to almost 2.5 Mb/day in
2006. Per capita consumption stands at about one
barrel per year, which is extremely low when
compared with industrialized countries (that is
at least ten times higher). Accordingly,
excluding a rapid increase in domestic
consumption, one expects Africa will go on being
a net exporter until 2030, albeit at an ever
decreasing rate. As such, Africa attracts the
eager attention of oil dependent powers, namely
the European Union, the USA and P.R. China.
On the other hand, African oil-importing
countries face mounting challenges as a result of
the worlds dwindling oil supplies and
growing oil prices. The hardest hit are the
poorest. For instance, Senegal's budget deficit
doubled in 2006, inflation accelerated and growth
slowed as oil prices increased in the
international market and the state-owned
petrochemical industry had to shut down for long
periods.
Were Africa to attain a fourfold increase of
its present average income levelto reach a
middle income level by world standardsit
would absorb all its hydrocarbon production
capacity, becoming unable to export them to the
world market. Africa is eyed by the world
capitalist system as being simultaneously very
rich (in natural resources) and extremely poor
(in peoples living standard), a regrettable
combination that nevertheless is the origin of
the surpluses that are exported to the world
market, feeding the consumerism of rich countries
and the profits of the trans-national
corporations at the expense of present standard
of living of Africans and compromising the future
industrialization of the continent.
III
Between 1965 and 1999 there were seventy-three
civil wars in the world, almost all driven by the
struggle to control natural resources such as
oil, diamonds and copper. It is a fact that
countries relying on one or two major export have
more than a one-in-five chance of civil war, a
proportion far higher than in countries with a
broad spectrum of foreign trade. Highly
specialized economies, based on either intensive
or mono-cultural agriculture or over-exploitation
of a few mineral resources and focused on serving
foreign interests, tend to corrupt ruling elites
and divert human and material resources from the
economic activities that satisfy social
necessities, depriving the population at large
from their basic needs. Resource wars with their
devastating impacts on civilians became common in
the twentieth century. Many of these were in
Africa.
Oil
rich countries of Africa (namely Nigeria, Gabon,
Sudan, Congo, Equatorial Africa, and Chad) have
long histories of coups, military rule and
dictatorship. Millions have died of hunger,
disease and murder while wars over oil, diamonds,
copper, and other mineral resources made
life-generating economic activity difficult or
impossible to proceed.
Consider Congo, one of the resource-richest
countries on the planet: a half dozen foreign
countries have armies deployed there, supporting
countless rebel groups who fight to control rich
deposits of gold, diamonds, copper, cobalt and
tantalum/niobium. Despite its riches, Congo
carries ominous foreign debts.
Angola, the fifth largest oil producer in the
continent, only recently is recovering from a
long civil war, backed by foreign powers, during
which war factions brutally looted huge amounts
of diamonds, ivory, and other resources to be
sold abroad in exchange for weapons. In Angola, a
million people died in the civil war, and 40
percent of the population has been displaced.
Only a small fraction of the current income from
the state-owned oil company is actually applied
to develop the country to the benefit of its
population.
In Nigeria, exceptionally rich in oil and gas,
the environment of the Niger Delta is being
destroyed beyond recovery and the resources are
being depleted, while people are killed by army
mercenaries protecting Shell oil.
Equatorial Guinea, where a third of the
population has been killed or driven into exile,
receives half a billion in oil revenues, thereby
ranking sixth in the world in terms of per capita
income, nevertheless ranking third from the
bottom in the human development index scale.
Newly oil-exporting countries such as Sudan
and Chad are under threat of becoming new
business opportunities for the International Oil
Corporations and foreign National Oil
Corporations to take handsome profits.
Sudans capital Khartoum is booming with
skyscrapers and luxury hotels financed by the oil
revenues, whereas, well short of the most basic
needs, equity and reconciliation is still to be
attained in the western Darfur region. This
happens in parallel with so-called sanctions
imposed by the USA and European Union, officially
aimed at pressing the local government to promote
peace, but in fact justify foreign
military intervention in the conflict, to create
favourable conditions for the exploration of the
underground mineral resources (including water).
Across the border, Chad's government has
applied part of its oil revenue to buy weapons
rather than develop the country's bare
infrastructures.
Nearly every country in Africa is a case study
in this list of sinister examples. Africa bleeds,
notwithstanding its abundant wealth, constrained
by the world financial institutions
rulings, explored and looted by neo-colonial
foreign investment, by open or disguised
interference in the form of foreign humanitarian
aid or aid for development, or straight on
violence fed by foreign weapons in exchange for
essential raw-materials or precious materials.
IV
Africa is likely to suffer continued conflict
in the short term, given Africa's undeveloped
reserves of a number of highly prized mineral
commodities. Moves by a number of outside
political powers, beyond the ex-colonial European
countries, have developed within the last decade
in an accelerated fashion. The evolving African
map of external connections and investment deals
shows clearly the rate at which the worlds
main protagonists have begun playing the end game
for oil and other scarce raw materials, on which
the modern global economy is most dependent.
Explored and neglected Africa still appears as
an open continent in the eyes of the world
powers. It has been relatively free of the
USAs hegemonic control so far. A recent
tour by the Iranian President to seven African
countries, followed by the announcement of oil
development agreements between the National
Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) with the Nigeria
counterpart (NNPC) and the Ivory Coast, are a
sign of this. As it is, the active economic
cooperation policy entertained by China in
developing infrastructures and resources in
several countries, on bilateral basis and via the
China-Africa Cooperation Forum, convened by China
and the African Union. But the USA designated
West African oil resources as constituting a
national strategic interest in 2001. And the
European Union is attempting to strengthen its
economic links to the continent, profiting from
the foothold acquired by the former colonial
powers there, of which the November 2007 summit
between the European and the African Unions was a
token but also a sign of growing African
assertiveness, for which the broadening global
competition for investment and trade added
support.
China
pays billions of dollars from its bank reserves
through the China National Offshore Oil Corp
(CNOOC) to acquire stakes in promising oilfields,
as it recently did in Nigeria for developing
offshore blocks. Command over highly specialized
technological means are becoming vital to attain
access and productive advantage over rival
partners, particularly in Africa where geological
settings are demanding and oil resources are
diffuse. Chinese corporations, backed by
universities and subsidiaries, are investing
heavily in research and development, thereby
earning recognition across the world. Meanwhile,
China is in terms with Nigeria, Sudan, Chad and
Angola to take shares in developing their oil
reserves, in order to increase the supply of
African oil for its fast growing home economy.
The
recently announced United States Africa Command
(AFRICOM) is a new military headquarters devoted
solely to Africa, the result of an internal
reorganization of the USA military command
structure. It officially will be responsible for
the military relations with the African
countries. Some African leaderships were led to
view AFRICOM as an opportunity. The USA has
already been offered Liberia to host AFRICOM, and
is looking at Sao Tome and Principe, Equatorial
Guinea, Kenya, Djibouti, and Ethiopia as possible
locations, while having secured access agreements
with Senegal, Mali, Ghana, Gabon and Namibia. In
the front and wake of this imperialist move, some
African nations are receiving significant
military aid and weapons sales; most of this has
gone to oil-rich and compliant states.
Accordingly, during the last decade several US
Special Forces bases have been erected in several
parts of the continent, from the Horn of Africa
in Djibouti and Somalia through West Africa where
their presence is growing rapidly. Thus AFRICOM
has already secured a foothold in the East, close
to the oil transportation lanes exiting the
Persian Gulf. In Djibouti, at a former Foreign
Legion base, Djiboutians as well as elements of
the Ethiopian, Ugandan and Kenyan armed forces
have been receiving training on small naval
patrol tactics and counter terrorism
operations. However, the Gulf of Guinea in the
West, having developed later but holding its own
prize, cannot be neglected. There are now
launch-pads in Ghana, Mali and Senegal;
mini-bases were installed in Gabon; maritime
control patrol commands were anchored off the
coast of Nigeria; and a major naval base in the
Republic of Sao Tome and Principe is at advanced
stage of construction.
AFRICOM is the official acknowledgement by the
USA of Africas growing strategic
importance; it also demonstrates the way ageing
hegemonic power sees the exercise of its
influence in attaining its economic and
geo-strategic objectives. Financial and
technological competition can both serve the
capital interests of all parties and exasperate
their inherent contradictions, bringing in the
menace of military solutions. What
part will the multitude of military installations
and combat groups play to secure the capital
interests of the USA and the EU? What part will
proxy warfare play on African soil? The
competition for resources is unfolding across
Africa as in the past, but the depletion and
upcoming scarcity of energy, soil and water, and
essential commodities for sustaining the
economic growth in the
developed world, threatens anew with
old and novel fashions of resource wars.
The present rush for African natural resources
to be exported might turn out to be a path of no
return for Africa, given that Africa will thus
become dispossessed of those scarce resources
that would be essential to its future economical
development, such as hydrocarbonscrude oil
and natural gas. African countries see the
viability of evolving to higher stages of
development, including added industrial value to
their own raw-materials, becoming strongly
undermined. There was a window of opportunity
that opened with the national liberation and
de-colonization, but that is now about to close
again. Will Africa have its future denied?
Source: Regional Assessment Africa, ASPO
Newsletter, n.º 68, August 2006
The Beginning of the Oil End Game
featuring original FTW maps, Michael C. Ruppert,
From the Wilderness, January 25, 2005
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