The Resource Curse

The resource curse is, essentially, the idea that countries with lots of mineral wealth tend to have lousy economic development. A wee few in a resource-rich country will become very affluent themselves, while the masses live in crushing destitution.

It's not unique to Africa, but the resource curse seems to apply especially well to the sprawling land mass that's the cradle of our species and home to about 15 per cent of humans but only two per cent of global GDP.

The continent has 40 per cent of the world's gold reserves, 15 per cent of petroleum reserves, 80 per cent of platinum reserves, and much of the planet's diamonds and copper, yet the economic reality for the masses living in African countries flush with those sought-after commodities is rather bleak.

Consider Angola as an example. The former Portuguese colony has an abundance of oil, sizable diamond mines and impressive economic growth that has outpaced China's in some of the 13 years since a protracted civil war ended there. Yet three in four residents of Angola's capital city, Luanda, live in crime-ridden slums without reliable supplies of electricity, and 40 per cent of Angolans live in what the World Bank defines as "extreme poverty."

It's a similar story in oil-endowed Nigeria, where two-thirds live in extreme poverty, and in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) with its vast wealth of gold, cobalt, copper, diamonds and tantalum. Extreme poverty is reality for about nine out of 10 people in Congo.

In these and other sub-Saharan countries, having great volumes of minerals and gems in the ground has not at all meant economic security for the average citizen.

Africa is being looted by indigenous elites in concert with powerful multinational corporations.

And the big foreign companies aren't just European and North American anymore. China has wedged its way into the racket in a modern colonial-type system that revolves around unholy alliances between "unaccountable African rulers" and rapacious foreign capitalists and India now wants its share of the spoils