Natural resource management and development in African states via their extractive economies

Abstract

The modern African states’ development path has been largely shaped by availability or unavailability of natural resources. States endowed with important natural recourses attracted foreign direct investments in form of transnational and multinational corporations, which to a large extent, dictated the pattern and nature of trade in such natural resources. The management of such natural resources is largely determined and predicated upon the competition over the sharing of surplus of production, as in the proceeds therein, by the dominant elites in such resource rich African countries. These elites, unfortunately disingenuous, as they are,  rely heavily on the extraction and trade in such natural resources depriving their countries and people of true leadership equipped to steer the affairs of their countries in the right direction. A development paradigm dictated by the proceeds from such trade in the  extraction of natural resources is inevitably linked up with the fluctuation in global prices of such natural resources. Through the vintage perspective of the qualitative-descriptive approach, this paper contends that African states whose economies depend upon natural resources, have inevitably been underdeveloped due to some internal and external dynamics, related to their kind of leadership and the global trends in the trade of such natural resources.