Africa's Oil Dreams

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São Tomé: The Dream Lives
If são tomé really has the oil it hopes for, can the island get it right where so many others have failed? Maybe. In 2003, a group of former mercenaries known as the Buffaloes seized power for a week to protest over the secrecy and corruption surrounding concessions granted to Nigeria. The Buffaloes are now the Christian Democratic Front, and the support they lay claim to underlines public wariness that São Tomé might "do a Gabon," as the party's leader Alecio Costa puts it.

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Praxeres, executive director of the National Petroleum Agency, insists it won't happen. São Tomé has constructed a watertight system of oversight and transparency, he says, that will take petrol revenue out of government hands and put it under the control of an independent commission. The government has even set up an account at the Federal Reserve in the U.S. to hold all the cash that it expects to flood in. "We've learned the lessons of Africa," says Praxeres. "We have to use the money to invest in education, infrastructure and health — a future that is sustainable."

Praxeres and his compatriots will have to wait a while. Though Chevron and Exxon Mobil may have lost some of their earlier excitement over São Tomé, seismologists are convinced the oil is there — up to 11 billion barrels, according to Exxon Mobil's survey in 2000. But as yet, it's not clear how accessible those reserves might be. That gives São Tomé's people time to think and dream — but to do so with a caution that not all Africans have shown when the drillers come to town. In Club Tropicana, Salvaterra ponders his country's future. "I really hope we do have oil," he says. "But maybe just a little bit."