Africa's oil assets fuel 'a new dynamic'

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen

By

PORT HARCOURT, Nigeria

Europe's great powers once scrambled for dominance across vast, underdeveloped African lands rich in raw resources, including the scarlet palm oil used to grease the first cogs of the Industrial Revolution.

A century later, a new group of nations are competing for a very different kind of oil, with sub-Saharan Africa closing in on the Persian Gulf as the prime overseas supplier of petroleum to the last remaining superpower.

As China and India increasingly prospect for resources here, as terrorism concerns rise and as the U.S. military seeks a permanent military presence in Africa, the continent enjoys its greatest international influence in decades. Whether Africa can use its newfound might to end its deep-seated problems is a separate issue.

"There's a new dynamic in play" for African nations, said Antony Goldman, an independent risk-analysis consultant based in London, "and the challenge for those countries is how to manage that."

In 1993, the earliest year for which there are full figures, the main African oil-producing countries — Nigeria, Angola, Cameroon, Chad, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon — shipped about 494,000 barrels per day of oil to the United States, according to the official Energy Information Administration — just 7 percent of total U.S. imports. In the same year, the Persian Gulf nations averaged 1.6 million barrels per day, or about a quarter of all U.S. imports.

By 2006, sub-Saharan African oil constituted about 18 percent of U.S. imports, or about 1.8 million barrels per day; the Persian Gulf made up 2.2 million barrels per day, or 21 percent of total daily imports.

Oil curse

But the oil producers are among the sickest countries in Africa. While poorer nations such as Senegal, Mali, Liberia, Burundi and Ghana have made democratic advances, the oil countries are still mostly run by weak or illegitimate leaders.

Angola is emerging from one of the continent's longest-running civil wars. Chad, which has only been exporting oil for a few years, is in the depths of one. Chad's crude reaches African export terminals in oil-rich Cameroon, whose president has been in power for a quarter of a century.