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The Liberal was founded in 1821 by Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt, and ran for four issues between 1822-1824. It was re-launched 180 years later with an aspiration to see – in the words of our predecessors’ first editorial – “the mind of man exhibiting powers of its own, and at the same time helping to carry on the best interests of human nature”.

“PEACEis suddenly breaking out across Africa...From Congo to Uganda and Burundi, rebels are abandoning armed struggle in favour of settlement”. Barely two years after this optimistic assertion by The Independent newspaper, in the Congo, Uganda and Burundi, and across swathes of central and southern Africa, rebels and militias are re-taking arms in increasingly vicious and complex cross-border conflicts. The participants of the Second Congo War, which between 1998 and 2003 killed 3.8 million people, are not the only nations experiencing a resurgence in warfare; their neighbours, in Sudan, Somalia and the Central African Republic, each face violent division on more than one front. And in nearly every case, the roots of contestation lie in a quarrel over resources –for it is, paradoxically, the natural wealth of Africa that has consistently undermined its path to prosperity and peace. In 1975, the Venezualan founder of OPEC, Juan Pablo Péérez Alfonso, warned that “Ten years from now, twenty years from now, oil will bring us ruin. We are drowning in the Devil’s excrement”. While it is doubtful that his compatriot Hugo Cháávez would agree, few can deny the veracity of this prophecy, or the corrosive effect of ‘black gold’ on the African continent. Oil is a jealous resource; it creates a myopic market intolerant of diversification, by pricing out agriculture and industry. When petrodollars flood the economy –as in the six oil-producing countries that are responsible for around half of all investment flows in Africa – the cost of living rises dramatically (in 2003, Libreville, the capital of Gabon, was the third most expensive city in the world), making local goods more expensive and so less competitive: this, in turn, creates a culture of extreme centralisation and exacerbates the gap between the rich (those involved with oil) and the poor (those not). Oil also inspires jealousy; forty years after the Biafran War, a secessionist struggle stimulated in part by claims over ownership, oil continues to be a cause of schism, even when attempting to rectify its errors (Chevron recently conceded that its offer of ‘community aid’ in the Niger Delta was “divisive”, as it required recipients to identify themselves on ethnic grounds). This pattern is not confined to Africa: globally, nations dependent on oil and mineral exports are nearly fifty times as likely to witness civil war over a five year period, a situation further complicated by foreign interference, all too evident during Angola’s wretched 27-year conflict, the effects of which are still visible on the streets of Old Havana. The People’s Republic of China, which in tandem with apartheid South African worked (unsuccessfully) to destabilise the Cuban and Soviet-backed Marxist government, is now the primary investor in Angola’s booming economy, growing at a staggering 19% per annum, with oil production expected to reach 2 million barrels per day by 2008. China has secured contracts across the continent for a wide range of resources, including copper, timber, platinum, oil and natural gas, from South Africa all the way up to the Gulf of Guinea, an area now exporting more oil to the United States than Saudi Arabia and Kuwait combined. West African crudes are superior in terms of quality to those in the increasingly unstable Middle East, the former being sweeter and lighter, with fewer impurities, rendering a greater amount of gasoline on refinement. Yet the whirlwind of investment has reaped more victims than beneficiaries, a situation conveyed evocatively by Nicholas Shaxson in Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil:

Oil rigs are alighting all along this stretch of Africa’s western coastline like giant metal mosquitos, standing on the skin of the earth on spindly legs and drilling down with steel proboscises to suck out the fluid that is the lifeblood of the world economy. Like the biting insects, the rigs can cause irritation around the site of the extraction, disrupting local communities or polluting farmland. But it is this resource curse – the stealthier, time-delayed payload that accompanies the extraction, just like the malaria that real mosquitos transmit – that is the real threat.

4 | The Liberal | Autumn 2007