{UAH} Pojim/WBK: Oil-rich, lazy, stupid: It’s not going to happen, sorry - Comment
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Oil-rich, lazy, stupid: It's not going to happen, sorry
With oil prices still in the doghouse, African countries like Nigeria and Angola, that had grown fat on oil and almost forgotten how to do anything else that was productive, are going through hell.
It also means that it may be a while before Uganda and Kenya begin digging theirs out of the ground. At prices that are barely over $30 a barrel, it doesn't make money sense to invest in extracting the stuff as it would be the equivalent of buying a helicopter so you can use it to fly to your neighbour's house for dinner.
I am hoping oil doesn't bounce back big, not because I don't want our nations to swim in petrodollars or even because fossil fuels have become a danger to the environment, but rather because I think natural resources have become bad for human progress.
There is something inequitable in the fact that one country can sit on top of vast amounts of gold or oil, which it excavates and sells to the world for billions of dollars, while another country has nothing.
For example, there is nothing in the natural order, apart from quirks of geography and history, that merits Saudi Arabia having lots of oil and Rwanda having virtually none.
And South Africa did not deserve to have lots of gold, and Malawi nothing.
Critics of natural resources decry the "oil curse," a not very mysterious affliction that leads countries with lots of oil, for example, to become lazy and stop being creative in other areas, content to live off oil.
The bigger problem, though, is that with things like oil, human civilisation became too dependent on things it cannot control. Oil has remained largely the same oil for over 100 years.
Contrast that, for example, with the development in battery technology, also another energy source. In less than 10 years we could have batteries that run for over 25 years because there is a lot of incredible innovation and research going into improving them.
That gives people a lot of control over their future.
Second, natural resources are essentially anti-meritocratic.
For progress to happen, people who study and work hard, who master their environment, and who innovate deserve to be rewarded and honoured more than those who win natural-resource lotteries.
For it's they who find solutions that enable humankind to improve itself.
So, rather than mourning the collapse of commodity prices, we perhaps should be thankful. We may just have been saved from slothfulness and a collective relapse into stupidity in the future.
Last year Kakira Sugar Works, Uganda's biggest sugar producer, announced that it would start commercial output of ethanol at the end of July this year.
You have to respect that. There is nothing involved in making ethanol that you don't have to create through some form of human ingenuity. Even the land on which sugar is grown, has to be tamed.
The announcement did not make the national, regional and global headlines the way the discovery of oil did some years back.
However, ethanol production will reveal more about the possibilities of Uganda ever finding greatness, than any amount of riches it can possibly ever make from selling oil.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa. Twitter@cobbo3
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