Oil and politics in the Gulf of Guinea, by Ricardo M.S. Soares de Oliveira, London, Hurst & Co, 2007, 416 pp., £20.00, ISBN 9781850658580
This is an important and timely book concerned with the political economy of oil in Africa. As energy security emerges as an increasingly important issue in global politics, the Gulf of Guinea has come to be regarded as a critical new ‘frontier’ of oil and gas exploitation. The eight oil states of the Gulf together hold over 50 million barrels of oil or just under 5% of the world's proven oil reserves, around 80% of which is in Angola and Nigeria alone (p. 203). The ‘Gulf of Guinea’ – a region invented in this intensifying contest for oil and illustrative of ‘how space is easily conceptualised by capital and politics’ (p. 5) – is increasingly vital to the global oil market and has been ‘catapult[ed] … from strategic neglect into geopolitical stardom’ (p. 5). Soares de Oliveira presents an engaging and theoretically informed comparative account of oil and politics in Angola, Nigeria, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, Chad, São Tomé & Principe and Equatorial Guinea, critically examining the role of some of the key actors involved including oil companies, the oil producing states and oil importing countries. The book thus explores the fascinating relationships that link companies, the petroleum elites of host states and oil importing countries into a mutually rewarding partnership whilst also not overlooking some of the negative consequences for the majority of the region's citizens. Going beyond the limits of the ‘resource curse’ thesis, Soares de Oliveira critically interrogates the structures and interests that make ‘state failure’ not an aberration but a permanent political condition. These ‘successful failed states’ are characterised by petroleum elites that sign contracts and strike partnerships with oil companies enabling them to secure the economic rents necessary for their own survival and continued reproduction. The contemporary existence of petro-states in the region is not merely the result of a skewed market or of institutional failure, but of particular historical constellations that, though centred on oil, are individual and context specific, thus deserving particular explanations.
The book also provides a powerful and insightful exposition of the role that foreign oil companies and parastatal (national) oil companies (‘states within states’) play in perpetuating ‘failure’. The discussion of Sonangol in Angola is particularly strong. The company's emergence is set in historical context and the way in which its tentacles now stretch into a wide range of economic activities is laid bare. As an ‘impressively well networked’ national oil company (p. 92), the story of how Sonangol ‘crowds out’ other entrepreneurs or is run by presidential loyalists is well told here, as is the way in which the company has pursued a policy of joint ventures with major international players. The tangled webs that this can produce have, in Angola's case, become more evident in the form of, for example, Sonangol Sinopec International (SSI), a joint venture between Sinopec (the Chinese state-owned oil company) and China Sonangol International Holding (CSIH) (itself a particularly opaque agency) which has the backing of key stakeholders in the Angolan elite. Sonangol is also now currently in the process of establishing a joint venture for oil in Guinea together with China Sonangol and the China International Fund. One of the main strengths of the book is the way it can help us to make sense of these kinds of dubious convergences of interests (of local elites, international companies and global institutions) around oil, and the implications they have for politics and the prospects for ‘development’. Another is the focus on the kinds of space that are produced by these interactions, such as the oil-producing enclaves protected by various state and non-state security outfits ‘where companies and the state ensure levels of “stateness” that are absent in the remainder of the country’ (p. 106) while the bulk of the population has to fend for itself. The enclave nature of the oil economy (outwardly oriented, no provision for mass employment and with few if any linkages with other sectors of the domestic economy) is then replicated in the forms that states take in the region and the ways in which they divide territories into ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ spaces – just as in colonial times. In the case of the latter, ‘people therein virtually disappear from the radar of national politicians’ (p. 110).
In sum this is an impressive, original and insightful book that makes a very valuable contribution to our understanding of African political economy. It deserves to be read and engaged with widely.