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To see the African crisis, however, as a moral or ethical failure on the
part of the “international community” (not least in its failure to
meet the pledges promised by the Millennium Development Goals of reducing
poverty by half by 2015) is only a partial truth. The real crisis of Africa is
that after twenty-five years of brutal neoliberal reform, and savage World Bank
structural adjustment and IMF stabilization, African development has failed
catastrophically.

The pillaging and privatization of the
state—whatever its African “pathologies”—and the African
commons is the most extraordinary spectacle of accumulation by dispossession,
all made in the name of foreign assistance. The involution of the African city,
notes Davis, has as its corollary not an insurgent lumpenproletariat but rather
a vast political universe of Islamism and Pentecostalism. It is this occult
world of invisible powers—whether populist Islam in Kano or witchcraft in
Soweto—that represents the most compelling ideological legacy of
neoliberal utopianism in Africa.

The African accumulation crisis, and the dynamics of capital and trade
flows, are in practice complex and uneven. In addition to oil (and the very few
cases of manufacturing growth in places like Mauritius which are little more
than national export-processing platforms), the other source of economic
dynamism is the (uneven) emergence of global value chains. This can be seen
especially in relation to high-value agricultures (fresh fruits and vegetables)
in South Africa, flowers in Kenya, green beans in Senegal. Such forms of
contract production, typically buyer-driven commodity chains in which retailers
exert enormous power, have created islands of agrarian capitalism that
contribute to and deepen patterns of existing inequality across Africa and
further the interests of business elites, which are often not African. The
deepening of commodification in the countryside in tandem with demographic
pressures (caused as much by civil war and displacement as high fertility
regimes) has made land struggles a vivid part of the new landscape of African
development.

It is no surprise that against this backdrop the development establishment
flails around wildly. On the one side stands former World Bank economist
William Easterly for whom all aid (“planning”) has been a total (and
unaccountable) failure.

On the
other stands the one-man industry otherwise known as Jeffrey Sachs who seeks to
expand foreign aid—$30 billion a year for Africa—and to
initiate a Global Compact by which “the rich will help save the
poor,” who are as much hampered by poor physical geography as governance
failure.

In reality what is on offer is an even bleaker world of military
neoliberalism. At one pole are enclaves of often militarily fortified
accumulation (of which the oil complex is the paradigmatic case) and the
violent, sometimes chaotic, markets so graphically depicted in the documentary
film Darwin’s Nightmare. At the other pole are the black holes of
recession, withdrawal, and uneven commodification. These complex trajectories
of accumulation are dominated at this moment by the centrality of extraction
and a return to primary commodity production.

All African governments have organized their oil sectors through state oil
companies that have some forms of collaborative venture with the major
transnational oil companies (customarily operated through oil leases and joint
memoranda of understanding).

In general the international oil companies
operating in Africa have production share arrangements with state oil companies
(Nigeria is the exception which operates largely through joint ventures).

The nightmarish legacy of oil politics must be traced back to the heady boom
days of the 1970s. The boom detonated a huge influx of petro-dollars and
launched an ambitious (and largely autocratic) state-led modernization program.
Central to the operations of the new oil economy was the emergence of an
“oil complex” that overlaps with, but is not identical to, the
“petro-state.” The latter is comprised of several key institutional
elements: (1) a statutory monopoly over mineral exploitation, (2) a
nationalized (state) oil company that operates through joint ventures with oil
majors who are granted territorial concessions (blocs), (3) the security
apparatuses of the state (often working in a complementary fashion with the
private security forces of the companies) who ensure that costly investments
are secured, (4) the oil producing communities themselves within whose
customary jurisdiction the wells are located, and (5) a political mechanism by
which oil revenues are distributed.

The oil revenue distribution question—whether in a federal system like
Nigeria or in an autocratic monarchy like Saudi Arabia—is an indispensable
part of understanding the combustible politics of imperial oil.

there has been a process of radical fiscal
centralism in which the oil-producing states (composed of ethnic minorities)
have lost and the non-oil producing ethnic majorities have gained—by fair
means or foul.

the oil complex. First, the geo-strategic interest in oil
means that military and other forces are part of the local oil complex. Second,
local and global civil society enters into the oil complex either through
transnational advocacy groups concerned with human rights and the transparency
of the entire oil sector, or through local social movements and NGOs fighting
over the consequences of the oil industry and the accountability of the
petro-state. Third, the transnational oil business—the majors, the
independents, and the vast service industry—are actively involved in the
process of local development through community development, corporate social
responsibility and stakeholder inclusion. Fourth, the inevitable struggle over
oil wealth—who controls and owns it, who has rights over it, and how the
wealth is to be deployed and used—inserts a panoply of local political
forces (ethnic militias, paramilitaries, separatist movements, and so on) into
the operations of the oil complex (the conditions in Colombia are an exemplary
case). In some circumstances oil operations are the object of civil wars.
Fifth, multilateral development agencies (the IMF and the IBRD) and financial
corporations like the export credit agencies appear as key “brokers”
in the construction and expansion of the energy sectors in oil-producing states
(and latterly the multilaterals are pressured to become the enforcers of
transparency among governments and oil companies). And not least, there is the
relationship between oil and the shady world of drugs, illicit wealth (oil
theft for example), mercenaries, and the black economy.

oil complex is a sort of corporate enclave economy but also a center of
political and economic calculation that can only be understood through the
operation of a set of local, national, and transnational forces that can be
dubbed as “imperial oil.” The struggle for resource control that has
taken center stage o

The current crisis points to the fact that the oil-producing region in
Nigeria now stands at the center of Nigerian politics—for four reasons.
First, the efforts led by a number of Niger Delta states for “resource
control” expanded access to and control over oil and oil revenues. Second,
there was the struggle for self-determination of minority peoples in the region
and the clamor for a sovereign national conference to rewrite the
constitutional basis of the federation itself. Third, there is a crisis of rule
in the region as a number of state and local governments are rendered helpless
by militant youth movements, growing insecurity, and ugly intra-community,
inter-ethnic, and state violence which—as the recent events point
out—can threaten the flow of oil and the much vaunted energy security of
the United States. And not least, there is the emergence of a so-called
South-South Alliance making for a powerful coalition of small and hitherto
politically marginalized oil producing states (Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River,
Delta, Ondo, and Rivers) capable of challenging the ruling ethnic majorities
(the Hausa, the Yoruba, and the Ibo) in the run-up to the 2007 elections.

Not surprisingly the deadly operations of corporate oil, autocratic
petro-states, and the violent potentialities of the oil complex have forced the
question of transparency and accountability of oil operations onto the
international agenda. Tony Blair’s Extractive Industries Transparency
Initiative, the IMF’s oil diagnostics program, and the Soros
Foundation’s Revenue Watch are all (voluntary) efforts to provide a veneer
of respectability to a rank and turbulent industry. But the real action lies
elsewhere. The danger is that the ongoing U.S. militarization of the region
could amplify the presence of mercenaries and paramilitaries, creating
conditions not unlike those in Colombia.