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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.

Says Saul, “A key way to transition away from dependence on oil is through debt cancellation. Countries need fiscal space in order to invest in the post-fossil fuel economy — but the debt trap keeps countries from meeting a wide variety of social needs.”