Temporal analysis is often missing in the discourse on the ‘resource curse’, but in Oil, democracy, and development in Africa, the American political scientist J. R. Heilbrunn applies it to oil production and export in Africa. The book argues that the effects of oil in Africa are dependent on (a) the nature of institutions at the time of the discovery; (b) the phase of oil production and whether the exporting country is emerging, mature, or declining; and (c) colonial legacy, how it moulds the nature of the institutions in Africa, and how such institutions experience oil. So, according to Heilbrunn, the ‘resource curse’ analysis does not apply in Africa.
This argument leads Heilbrunn to an alternative, a resource blessing thesis. By resource blessing, Heilbrunn does not suggest that oil does not pose any challenges at all; indeed he argues that corruption takes on more complex forms in oil democracies. Regardless, however, he argues that, over time, all the oil democracies in Africa have become better off mainly in terms of growth but also in terms of democratic gains. The reason, Dr Heilbrunn argues, is that oil brings in resources and even if these are mismanaged they have, overall, created many positive outcomes that would not have been possible without oil (see, for example, 15–17). Besides, if African countries could set up sovereign wealth funds underpinned by Milton Friedman's permanent income hypothesis which, according to the book, informs the Norwegian sovereign wealth funds, then the blessings will even be more substantial and more permanent (120–124). The book acknowledges the different institutional challenges that stand in the way of oil-rich African countries in essentially ‘catching up’ with the likes of Norway and other model Western institutions. The African examples used in this book range from emerging (e.g., Ghana), mature (e.g., Nigeria, Sudan, Equatorial Guinea and Angola: see Table 4.2, 134), and declining (e.g., Cameroon, Republic of Congo, Gabon: see Table 4.4, 138) oil producers.
The book comprises an introduction and six chapters. These set the scene (Introduction); map out the two extreme cases of oil impacts, Ghana and Nigeria (Chapter 1); discuss colonialism and how it has moulded African institutions (Chapter 2); and describe oil companies and the strategies they tend to adopt in their operations in Africa (Chapter 3). Chapters 4, 5, and 6 deal respectively with the phase of production and economic growth; oil and corruption; and how non-oil-specific politics eventually transforms oil experiences.
The book is attentive to existing scholarship. It is clearly and engagingly written, and usually careful in its claims, except in a few cases (see, for example, the claim that oil companies are protected by petro-states because they dutifully pay their taxes, 114), which, considering the research by Joe Amoako-Tuffour (2010), is not supported even by the Ghana case, which the book regards in a relatively positive light.
There are also some trips in a few areas. First, the description of democracy as ‘the politician's acceptance of a possibility of losing office’ (185) seems limited. In turn, Africa is styled as having no democracy until the advent of European democracy. This reduces to nought the decades of participatory governance on the continent going back to the days when chiefs were held accountable by youth groups and youth leaders who owed their position to the popular support demonstrated through the casting of lots, detailed analysis of which can be found in recent books such as Frederick Cooper's Africa in the world: capitalism, empire, nation-state (2014). Heilbrunn's preferred conception of democracy also risks becoming a platform for redesigning institutions in Africa in the image of Western ones, which his book suggests constitute a model or models. The Norwegian model, for example, is presented as enlightened technocratic management, although recent evidence in the book Flammable societies, edited by John Andrew McNeish and Owen Logan (2012), shows that the ‘Norwegian model’ is rather a product of bottom-up major civil society and trade union struggles.
Perhaps the most contestable element in Heilbrunn's Oil, democracy, and development in Africa is the topos of success it seeks to espouse. The book promises ‘development’ in its title, but the analysis hinges on economic growth (see, for example, Chapter 4) with assertions about ‘economic development’ in the closing arguments (219–229). There are many twists and turns in the argument about democracy, corruption and elections, but the visible absence of a detailed discussion of (re)distribution among different and differential property relations, community and local practices, and ecological concerns will make students of political economy of development cringe. The methodological individualism in Amartya Sen's (1999) work on development and freedom has long been pointed out by, among others, Charles Gore (1997), but in Oil, democracy, and development in Africa the veil of broad-based analysis in Sen's work is blasted away and Sen's work is reduced to ‘freedom and choice’ (6) or ‘freedom to choose’ (147), leading the author to equate growth with development or, at best, propose a growth-based path to development.
There is much evidence to make the argument that oil economies in Africa are not simply a basket case of ‘resource curse’ states. Indeed there is strong evidence to argue that the rents from resources can be harnessed for social protection and social development, as shown in the book Mineral rents and the financing of social policy: opportunities and challenges, edited by Katja Hujo of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (Hujo 2012). However, to contend that oil resources are a blessing because they drive economic growth, as the book under review does, is to oversimplify a complex and nuanced argument and assert an(other) orthodoxy.