False Economy - Alan Beattie [58]
Even in rich, stable democracies where the revenue is collected honestly, the distribution of oil revenue can cause tension. Alaska, for example, is sufficiently rich in oil and gas that it has no income tax and in fact hands out a dividend to each citizen, which over the past decade averaged around $1,500 a year. Periodic arguments have broken out, one of which went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, about whether recent arrivals in Alaska were entitled to as much of a bonus as long-term residents. It is perhaps fortunate that to get the handout you have to move to a cold, remote state where it is dark for more than twenty hours a day in winter, which presumably deters a large number of bounty hunters. If oil was discovered in sunny southern California and the petroleum payouts started, the western seaboard might start to crumble into the Pacific from the weight of Americans flooding into San Diego with their hands out for free dollars.
And in countries where the weakness of democracy and government makes it easy arbitrarily to raise taxes and steal the money, or use it to buy favors, or simply to skim off revenue outright, the struggles become extraordinarily destructive and all-pervading. There is nothing so dangerous to a nervous government as the rapid rise of a potential new power base funded by a dependable stream of money outside of state control.
When the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was formed in the 1970s, it aimed to extend the monopoly of oil over the whole world—to create a global cartel. But even at the time, there were some who foresaw the result. Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso, the Venezuelan who was OPEC's first head, predicted, sadly, and all too accurately: "Ten years from now, twenty years from now, oil will bring us ruin. It is the devil's excrement. We are drowning in the devil's excrement."
As we will see in a later chapter, the dominance of oil and gas in the Russian economy has helped to weaken democracy in that country, and seems likely to keep things that way. And it is no coincidence that the four longest-serving rulers in Africa, all autocrats, are in oil zones. Their governments do little more than keep themselves in power, being frequently embroiled in armed conflict, and certainly deliver very little to their citizens. They are what the scholar Ricardo Soares de Oliveira calls "successful failed states."
Mineral resources can also provoke various other kinds of destructive competition: from rebels within, from states without, and between owners and workers. Many civil wars are decided by the inability of one side or another to keep supplying itself, even if it controls part of the country. The South lost the American Civil War partly because the supply lines of food and armaments to its military were so stretched. Both sides in the English Civil War in the seventeenth century encountered rioting opposition from locals who were tired of being continually shaken down for food and money. But civil wars funded by natural resources that can be sold outside the country can continue pretty much indefinitely.
Historically, resource-rich countries, particularly those that have other characteristics associated with conflict, such as poverty and low growth, are much more likely to break out in civil war. Jonas Savimbi, the leader of the rebel movement UNITA in Angola, ran what was in effect an alternative state in the jungle for nearly twenty years. He fought a civil war that began as soon as Angola gained independence from Portugal in 1975. He continued fighting, with occasional breaks for botched elections and failed peace accords, until his death in 2002. It was a remarkable achievement of organization and