By Doug Bandow| – PORT HARCOURT, NIGERIA — I stepped into the elevator to head down for dinner.  It jerked to a stop and went silent, leaving me in darkness.  The finest hotel in Nigeria’s Houston, the hub of the country’s large and profitable oil industry, could not escape periodic power outages. A few very long seconds later brightness returned as the hotel’s emergency generator kicked in and the elevator continued its journey. My experience in the capital of Abuja was no different.  I interviewed …

By Verity Ratcliffe – In recent years, oil and gas discoveries have established east Africa as one of the world’s most promising frontiers. While the full scale of natural resources in Tanzania, Mozambique, Kenya, Uganda and Somalia remains unclear, early estimates indicate that there is significant potential – and this has raised public expectation. To varying degrees in all four countries, the prospect of petro-dollars has inspired a tug of war between central and regional leaders. The latter, in general, fear that the central government …

By Adeola Yusuf – President Goodluck Jonathan last Wednesday waded into the bickering between the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and the Central Bank of Nigeria over the missing $49.8 billion oil revenue. The two agency of government have been accusing each other of complexity in the missing oil revenue, representing 76 per cent of the total crude oil revenues from January 2012 to July 2013. Before this revelation, the African Development Bank (AfDB) had disclosed that an estimated N390 trillion ($2.6 trillion) is stolen annually through …

By Sarah Kiggundu – Ghana is located in West Africa, bordering the Gulf of Guinea, between the countries of Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso and Togo. This nation has a population of just over 25 million people. Over the past few years, West Africa has enjoyed an economic revival due to an abundance of hydrocarbon resources in the region. The successes from Ghana’s Jubilee oilfield and the discovery of additional offshore oilfields (and findings further west in Sierra Leone) are indeed cause for enthusiasm. Ghana, which …