If you want a pretty good example of the resource curse at work, let this one roll around in your brain for a minute: Nigeria is suffering a potentially crippling fuel scarcity. That’s right: oil rich Nigeria, which has Africa’s largest population and theoretically (and so far just about only only theoretically) ought to be a regional economic engine is not able to provide fuel for its domestic economy. There are a number of factors at work here, ranging from economic inefficiency to the internal colonization that oil creates in Nigeria and elsewhere (I pay more in West Texas, for example, for gasoline than I do in other parts of the United States) to utter mismanagement to the political chaos that oil foments. Still, that Nigeria faces such a shortage is nothing short of dumbfounding.
