Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil,   ISBN:9780156033725

Customer Rating: 

Excellent story about the precious resource - the TOTT Literature Circle learned to love it, except for Father O'Hair who expected a different account. He only read "Untapped, The Scramble..." and assumed a different experience. The good padre couldn't figure out the role of his piety in this writing.

Customer Rating: 

The book was very informative and the content was interesting. My only negative is the book kind of dragged on for me. It was a lot to keep up with but the information kind of blended together and it made some of the facts hard to remember,

Customer Rating: 

This is an eminently readable book about the oil-rich nations of Africa. Ghazvinian weaves together a serious treatise on the problems of development with entertaining travel narratives. For example, we're given a taste of what it's like to live in Nigeria, recounted with a sense of humor, juxtaposed with a serious discussion of Nigerian economics. The author's style was a delight to read.

Ghazvinian's theme is that oil or other mineral resources actually destroy a country, as counterintuitive as that may seem. The currency escalates in value, which puts farmers and manufacturers out of business. We thus have the paradox of an oil-rich country like Gabon having to import tropical fruit. The government becomes less responsive to the people because its revenue comes from the oil companies, not the general public. The average citizen may actually find that their standard of living declines. Civil wars and corruption abound. At worst, the country disintegrates into chaos, with Nigeria as a prime example.

However, I couldn't help but make a mental list of exceptions to this pattern. The Arab emirates of the Gulf region are not democracies but at least their wealth has filtered down to benefit ordinary citizens. The economies of Botswana and Namibia are based on diamond deposits, yet contrary to Ghazvinian's thesis, these countries are multiparty democracies with reasonable standards of living. In spite of these exceptions, Ghazvinian makes a powerful case that the worst thing that can happen to a developing country is to find oil.

Nigeria, not surprisingly, gets the most attention in this book. Also covered are Angola, Cameroon, Chad, Congo (Brazzaville), Gabon, and Sudan. The tiny island nations of Sao Tome and Equatorial Guinea receive a lot of page space. Equatorial Guinea is a particularly sad tale of how oil transformed a tiny country into the ultimate example of a kleptocracy.

Customer Rating: 

I give this book two thumbs up and have recommended it to many friends. I worked in Nigeria as a production geologist for 3.5 years, Ghazvinian captured the spirit of the country accurately. Ghazvinian presented a fair and balanced account of oil and gas development in each country without slipping into appreciable editorializing. In this respect, the book's chapters on Nigeria and Chad are more informative than those in Lisa Margonelli's book 'Oil on the Brain' which was short on data/facts and long on editorializing in later chapters.

I won't get into a long-winded review, but suffice to say I learned a lot from reading this book. For example, this interesting nugget - of the 51 members of Equatorial Guinea's cabinet (51!!!), 20 are members of the immediate family of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema. Wow! This cannot be blamed on Exxon. The Nigeria chapter also includes a lengthy account of bunkering - the theft of oil by armed bandits, organized crime syndicates and ethnic 'freedom fighters'.

Customer Rating: 

Having just finished The Prize, Daniel Yergin's excellent book about the history of oil, I looked forward to reading this book to find out more about what was happening on the African oil scene. However, I must say I was severely disappointed. While the first person tales of travel through many of these West African oil countries is fascinating stuff, I sometimes felt the author was losing track of his story. Surely there was no need to spend time with cocoa bean farmers in Sao Tome who appeared to have nothing to do with oil at all, except that they lived on Sao Tome.

Worse are the many assertions about events in Africa with no attempt to back them up with independent research. Surely many elections are rigged in Africa, but it wouldn't hurt to provide some independent evidence about this. We, as always it seems, are at the mercy of the author's opinions.

This is a poorly written book ("whoever smelt it dealt it" ... please, I don't mind an informal tone, but this is a bit too much), poorly researched, that left me feeling as if this important story had been treated far too lightly.

~alex kirtland