Governing African oil and gas

Between 2004 and 2014, the combined effects of high prices and increased production fuelled an extraordinary oil boom across Sub-Saharan Africa. The boom happened for the first time on a genuinely pan-continental scale, with the older oil producers joined by a large number of new and prospective oil and gas producers, especially in East Africa, with learning and emulation occurring across a wider canvas than ever before. Major shifts during this period included a diversified geopolitical landscape where Asian markets overtook the West as the endpoint of African hydrocarbons, and western corporations faced new competition and cooperation from state-owned Asian corporations and independent small cap oil firms; improvements in macro-economic management that emphasised low inflation, revenue optimisation via global capital markets, and (for a time) debt sustainability, with a prominent role for technocratic enclaves in public administration; an ubiquitous discourse on good governance of the extractive industries spawning efforts such as Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI); and a greater degree of political pluralism and openness, even in authoritarian settings.

The era of the boom started more or less abruptly and closed in an equally drastic manner in mid-2014 with the sharp drop in oil prices. This so-called “golden decade” for oil and gas, which coincided with the optimistic discourse about “Africa Rising” and accounts for a great deal of its commodity-based growth momentum, can now be studied with a degree of detachment. In the intervening period, it has become clear that continent-wide postcolonial patterns of resource dependence proved resilient, even if the political and economic dynamics of the post-2004 boom were not simply a replay of previous booms. In short, the boom years did not amount to a transformative shift in state-society relations, the structure of African oil-rich economies or their engagement with the international system. Nonetheless, they left an indelible mark.