FEOS wrote:
Africa's a whole different kettle of fish. The tribal society and expectations of graft are much worse than anywhere else...but our diplomats and developers would be going in understanding and accounting for that (this time). The problem with either oil or cash is that both are easily embezzled by the governments there (again, has to be taken into account in the development planning).
The key is keeping the money out of the governments' hands directly, working with NGOs and the UN to get the development taken care of. Once the people see the value of the natural resource, they will not allow the graft to occur. That's why it takes at least a couple of generations...to grow the graft tendencies out of the people and let the "old guard" die off.
The question is can you? If we look at Nigeria none of the oil investment has really gone anywhere near the people. Oil companies generally don't want to hire locals and instead fly in their own workers or experts, pipelines are punctured by locals and its siphoned off to fund warlords. The discovery and exploitation of oil in that country has done nothing but increase tensions between tribes and promote conflict - with poverty being just as widespread, if not more, as before it was discovered. This situation can be found in many African countries. If not, other nations' oil reserves are held by select closed groups that hoard all the wealth and can be prone to infighting. Beyond that the discovery and exploitation of valuable natural resources in this continent has often gone at the disadvantage of other industries, which got either abandoned or marginalized to the detriment of economies.
I'm rather sceptical of the idea that you could get anything done there. How is this 'new approach' going to work? How are you going to invest in the populace if oil companies generally aren't interested in the local workforce and when there's a sort of aristocracy which you'll have to pay to get anywhere near the resources? It's not like they'll invest in their countries if you ask them nicely... yet they own the fields so you can't avoid them. Do you intend to micromanage oil companies' dealings with govs. like that of Angola? I just can't see how this is going to work. 200 years of exploiting resources in Africa with varying approaches and rarely, if ever, it's had a positive result.
We have been aware of the corruption there for decades. 'Accounting' for it on paper is something wholly different than actually dealing with it on the ground. So far we've 'dealt' with it by bribery and support of dictators that let us get to their resources, exacerbating the problem. Yet there hasn't really been any other way to get to the resources.
It's going to require one hell of a plan and an enormous amount of investment to get this right, it's not going to be 'cheap oil' that's for sure.
