Senegal sees oil as anti-poverty tool

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DAKAR, Senegal -- As the Group of Eight meets this week in Germany, one African leader is hoping to use the new flood of oil profits for a novel cause: combating poverty in Africa's non-oil-producing nations.

"Energy and infrastructure -- those are the new links," said Senegal's octogenarian president, Abdoulaye Wade, in an interview in Dakar before he left for the G-8 meeting in the seaside resort of Heiligendamm today . Mr. Wade will be joining G-8 leaders, including President Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the new "pro-American" French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in Heiligendamm, where the agenda will be dominated by AIDS and global warming. Mr. Wade hopes to piggyback on those concerns to highlight the plight of the African poor and the high toll that rising energy prices exact on the African continent.

Mr. Wade is something of an anomaly in Africa -- a pro-Western leader of a predominantly Muslim nation. Since fall 2006, he has been leading a campaign to sensitize the West to the damaging impact of record oil prices on Africa's poorest nations, a group of 14 non-oil-producing countries.

Mr. Wade, who has a doctoral degree in economics, is employing a two-pronged approach. He has helped form the African Non-Petroleum Producers Association and has tried to stimulate the development of homegrown biofuels to curtail energy dependency. At the same time, Mr. Wade has called on oil companies to invest a portion of recent record profits to help fight African poverty, with financial backing from the international community.

The problem

Few Americans can readily appreciate the devastating impact of soaring energy prices in Dakar, Senegal's capital. In the Washington area , motorists typically start to fret when gas prices exceed $3 a gallon at the pump. In Dakar, gasoline costs close to $5.30 a gallon, and the price of a taxi ride from the airport to the downtown district has nearly doubled in a year.

In addition, the per-capita income in Senegal is a meager $849 a year, making the country's astronomical oil prices all but unbearable. Last summer, the lights went out for several hours a day in Dakar because the state electric company could not pay for fuel. Neighboring Guinea Bissau, too, hovers near a total blackout. In fact, with little notice in the West, an energy crunch has blanketed the entire sub-Saharan region. Even oil-rich Nigeria, with a per capita income of less than $1,500, sees long lines at gas stations.

Mr. Wade argued before the U.N. General Assembly in September that long-standing Western concerns about corruption and political repression in Africa are unlikely to be addressed without a "swift and massive investment in infrastructure and the availability of affordable energy."

Good governance and African efficiency, he told U.N. diplomats, hinge on the fate of energy prices and African development.