Doubts About Oil In Turkana Valid

Even as there was rejoicing in various parts of the nation over the announcement that oil had been found in Turkana County, two news items which came at about the same time, cast a dark shadow on this good news. First was a report that it was actually a Kenyan company – and presumably one with no experience in oil prospecting – which had initially received the license for those specific drilling blocks which had now proved so fruitful. And that hundreds of millions had been made by those who owned that Kenyan company.
The second news item was that there had been all kinds of fraudulent activity over land sales in the area around Konza where the proposed ‘Konza City’ mega-ICT project is supposed to be established. Both these reports seem to suggest that corruption is alive and well in Kenya. And that there are many in high places who – when anything which might in some way be of benefit to ordinary people comes up – will always find a way to profit from it, at the expense of these ordinary people.
And this is happening at a time when we have a coalition government. So what then are we to expect when there is an undisputedly-elected president, who has cronies to reward and promises to keep. As many local pundits have pointed out, the nations in which the ordinary citizens have benefited most from oil revenues, have invariably been those which already had strong structures supportive of democratic government already in place.
In other words, the prospect of such a flood of money gushing into the national coffers requires a high level of transparency and accountability. In the absence of these, you could have billions paid to a country as petroleum revenues, and there would be nothing to show for it except that within the political class, there were many more helicopters and private planes being used for election campaigns. The thing we need to bear in mind is that a large and commercially viable oilfield is the ultimate ‘game-changer’ in the politics of developing nations.
Entire parliaments can be subverted using the flow of petrodollars. Leading politicians, who had previously looked on each other with the bitterest contempt, suddenly find that they can actually get along just fine, if there are oil revenues to be shared. We must also consider the influence of the international donor community which has often been critical in frustrating the brazen excesses of our elected leaders through the threat of withholding foreign aid; or by visas being canceled for whichever VIP was seen to be going too far.
Once the oil wells begin to generate revenues, who will listen to the local representative of the World Bank; or pay heed to the British High Commission or the American Ambassador? What sums can they refuse to give us, which will in any way exceed what we are getting from international petroleum sales? Way back in the 1980s or thereabouts, African scholars and political commentators were broadly divided into two categories.
First there were the ‘Afro-optimists’ who generally believed that the grievous mistakes made by African leaders were just part of an inevitable learning process for a young nation. And that in time all would be well and African nations would take an honourable place within the community of nations, and no longer be seen as the pariahs.
Then there were the ‘Afro-pessimists’ whose basic outlook was much more grim. They argued that there was really no excuse for the outrageous failures of African leaders; that there was no excuse for African children dying before the age of five, of easily curable and easily preventable disease, while African politicians steadily accumulated vast fortunes in their offshore accounts.
And they basically said that there was no reason for optimism, given all the empirical evidence of widespread destructive misrule by corrupt elites, along with blind tribal rivalries, lingering superstitions and all the other factors which prevented Africans from constructing properly functioning state institutions. It seems to me there is plenty of room for pessimism over this good news from Turkana.
We are told that it will be at least five years before we see any real benefit from this oil. Well, if in 2008, we were able to go very far down the road to a Rwanda-type genocide and civil war, how can we have any confidence that in 2017 we will not immediately proceed down the road to a Nigeria-type squandering of the revenues from our petroleum sales.