The second scramble for Africa
 
Timothy Kalyegira
"The American company, NGEx Resources, announced in March that it had made
“an exciting new copper/zinc discovery” in the Aradaib area of northwestern
Eritrea, adding that this “gold content, high zinc and copper grade…could
represent a very significant new gold-rich massive sulphide discovery in a
new and unexplored area.”
As a continent, Africa remains at the margins of the world’s economy as it
has for the last 1,000 years and more. Television and photographic images of
Africa continue to be those of human misery, displacement, dirty
surroundings and backwardness.
It contributes only two percent of global trade, has only two percent of the
world’s Internet users, and is the poorest and least developed continent.
There are more refugees and internally displaced people in Africa and more
AIDS patients and victims than in any other part of the world.
In that sense, it is an unimportant part of the world order.
However, there are certain features about Africa that make it extremely
valuable - as there were in 1884 when the Berlin conference was called to
discuss parceling up this world’s second largest continent into geopolitical
spheres of influence and economic zones- and which in recent and coming
years will turn Africa into a global political, economic, and military
battleground nearly on the scale that the Middle East is today.
As it was in 1884, this very state of underdevelopment is what 125 years
later makes Africa such an important asset to the various competing world
powers.
A second, equally intense and self-seeking “Scramble for Africa” between the
major western and emerging world powers is now underway and the result could
prove devastating to the continent.
It will scuttle the national development plans of many countries, as African
states attempt to respond to the pressure from foreign powers desperate to
gain access to these vital resources.
It will exacerbate local ethnic and territorial tensions and conflicts, many
of them going back centuries. It will lead to unheard-of levels of
corruption as heads of state and their close aides act out the role of
vassal chiefs of 200 years ago as those earlier chiefs directly negotiated
with incoming colonial adventurers, missionaries and traders.
For the African states that try to hold onto their strategic resources,
there will be a return to the externally-orchestrated military coups,
assassinations and mutinies of the 1960s and 1970s.
The greatest threat to an African leader’s or government’s hold on power
will cease to be from opposition political parties or national uprisings,
but from powerful foreign governments and multinational corporations seeking
to control these strategic resources in Africa.
This very real insecurity to African regimes and leaders will in turn lead
them to focus their main energies on holding off external sabotage or
entering into alliances with one power against another, all of which will
result in the wasted 30-year period that marked African history from about
1960 to the end of the Cold War in 1990.


The greatest new resource discoveries,
Africa continues to possess vast quantities of the traditional high-value
minerals such as gold, bauxite, uranium, diamonds, cobalt, and other
minerals critical to world economic production. These were the minerals of
the 1800s.
However, in the last 15 years, apart from the traditional nations of North
Africa, Nigeria, Gabon and Angola, great new sources of petroleum oil and
natural gas have also been discovered in Sudan, Chad, Uganda, Equatorial
Guinea, Ethiopia, Ghana, and most likely more will be discovered in the
Democratic Republic of Congo.
Since June 2006, the UK-based oil firm Tullow has discovered what it says
are an estimated two billion barrels (or drums) of oil in north-central-west
Uganda in the Albertine sedimentary basin of Bunyoro toward the border with
Congo. Tullow Oil is also exploring for petroleum in Ghana.
In March 2010, Tullow Oil signed an agreement with the Ethiopian oil and gas
company, South West Energy Ltd, to explore the gas and oil reserves that
have been discovered in the Ogaden basin in southeast Ethiopia, in the
Somali Regional State populated by the ethnic Somali Ethiopians.
In Dec. 2005, South East Energy was granted exploring rights in a 21,187 sq.
km. area in the Ogaden Basin, an area where rebels of the Ogaden National
Liberation Front are staking a claim.
Two American companies, Africa Oil and Range Resources, say they have
discovered an estimated ten billion barrels of oil in the war-torn Somalia.
In February 2010, the American company Anadarko Petroleum discovered a huge
reservoir of natural gas off the Indian Ocean coast of Mozambique. Eni of
Italy, China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), the state-oil
company of China, and Petronas of Malaysia are all at various stages of
exploration in East Africa.
Reported the American newsmagazine Time (sister to CNN) on March 12, 2010:
“Seismic tests over the past 50 years have shown that countries up the coast
of East Africa have natural gas in abundance. Early data compiled by
industry consultants also suggest the presence of massive offshore oil
deposits. Those finds have spurred oil explorers to start dropping more
wells in East Africa, a region they say is an oil and gas bonanza just
waiting to be tapped, one of the last great frontiers in the hunt for
hydrocarbons.”
The world’s largest petroleum consumer, the United States, now imports more
than 11 percent of its oil from Africa.
The talk in the global oil industry is that there might be oil and natural
gas reserves in and offshore Africa that rival those in the Middle East.
The American company, NGEx Resources, announced in March that it had made
“an exciting new copper/zinc discovery” in the Aradaib area of northwestern
Eritrea, adding that this “gold content, high zinc and copper grade…could
represent a very significant new gold-rich massive sulphide discovery in a
new and unexplored area.”
Apart from its wealth of traditional minerals, the Democratic Republic of
Congo has about 80 percent of the world’s reserves of Columbite-Tantalite,
or Coltan, the tar-like mineral used in such high-value digital-era products
as mobile phones, digital cameras, laptop computers and video cameras.