Africa is endowed with many natural resources. Such resources have been able to benefit various other countries located outside the continent. For instance, oil has been instrumental in building the economies of Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar (Watts 51). However, the same effect has not been replicated in Africa. Most of the countries that have natural resources have not been able to reap the same benefits. The main reason for the lack of benefits is local corruption. This has meant that most of the benefits only accrue to a few local and well-connected individuals. This has led activists to try and correct the situation. They have tried to jump scale from the local to the global in an effort to get more international support to help them share the benefits to the local people.
Activists in Nigeria have been trying to raise awareness on the issue of oil resource exploitation for many years. They have tried to raise the issues with the local authorities to no avail. The reason for this failure is that the local authorities are either compromised or do not have the resources to combat the exploitation. The efforts of the activists to try and seek international help have not been entirely successful. It has helped to bring international awareness especially when there are issues of human rights abuses (Watts 71). However, the international companies have been at the fore front of exploiting these countries. They often pay bribes to the governments so that they can get unlimited rights to exploit the minerals. As a result, the local governments do not interfere with the international oil companies. The efforts to jump scale by the activists fail to achieve the needed success, because these international companies pay significant amounts of taxes to their home countries. This means that the international countries do not speak out adequately for fear of losing those revenues.
- Watts, Michael. “Resource curse? Governmentality, oil and power in the Niger Delta, Nigeria.” Geopolitics 9.1 (2004): 50-80.
