The oil curse is really a money curse. Money competes with money. The money that comes in from exportation of any resource will damage any economy by outbidding the local economy for labor and all the other resources money buys. If you let the money in wholesale, it will wreck you. If you keep that money out, what's the use of obtaining it? Foreign money is useful only in small quantities: enough to purchase those needs that it does not make sense to produce for yourself. Your goal should be to see that those needs are few and far between. Go for independence, and put export on the back burner. Uganda's government is working on a whole bunch of "right tracks". Unfortunately, being an oil exporter is not one of them.

There is no such a thing as Oil Curse, but there such a thing as Ignorance and Corruption Curse, the inability of African countries to control the harnessing and exploitation of its resources - be they oil or metals - for Africa's own benefit. The new scramble for African resources is now well under way. The firt time the exploiters sent emissaries under the guise of exporting religion, then the missionaries asked native Africans to close their eyes to pray, but only to discover on opening their eyes, their land was gone. Now they have transnational actors from propestecting, economic planners, to financial investors and policy framers, working with corrupt African technocrats and politicians doing the wanton exploitation. By making judicious unscrupulous financial arrangement favourable to these transnational entities, such as inflated interests rates on the ponzi schemers and their corrupt African collaborators are siphoning the oil boom even before a single well is sank. After the resources are depleted the Africans are left poorer, sicker - from the environmental degradation, and cynically bitter or dead. Oil only stands out, from other resources suchh as copper, because of the unprecedented swift and fast pace and magnitude (of money), and equality fast pace of destruction it has wrought.