Read all posts from ‘Avoiding the resource curse’

  Takoradi is a city on the brink of transformation. The discovery of oil and gas in commercial quantities in the Western Region of Ghana in 2007 has brought about the high cost of liv­ing in Sekondi-Takoradi and its surrounding communities. Haven’t lived and worked in Takoradi as an IT […]

Roughly six weeks after 34 striking miners were gunned down by police at the Marikana platinum mine in South Africa, the strikes are over and the miners have all gone back to work, having finally agreed to terms on a pay increase slightly lower than their original demands.  The dust […]

Indigenous peoples and resource exploitation. Who wins, who loses, how is the game played, how should it be played? Map of Equatorial Guinea (Photo credit: Wikipedia) When one lands in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, it is immediately apparent how resource-rich this country is. The silk cotton trees greeted us with their […]

Officeworkers had a half-day, schoolchildren were let out early—crowds formed below a large screen looking over a traffic roundabout in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. It was March 22, 2012, and Bangladesh was competing in cricket against Pakistan for the Asian Cup. After a tense game, Bangladesh ended only three […]

Oil has a comical way of affecting history. Many conspiracy theorists have blamed oil on a host of issues that have rocked the world in the past decade, including the Libyan Uprising especially and the Arab Spring, generally. Hardened schemers have gone as far as to suggest 9/11 and the […]