Africa Oil Week begins in Cape Town on 8 October. But the real scramble in Africa these days is for the green metals required for the energy transition.

A decade or so ago, Africa Oil Week took place against the backdrop of a scramble for oil and gas in Africa.

Recent discoveries at that time included Ghana's offshore Jubilee oil field in 2007 and Uganda's Albertine Graben oil deposit.

Africa was seen as the growth area for oil and gas exploration and production with a promising geology that held massive deposits waiting to be uncovered.

Lurking in the background was the corrosive impact that oil historically had on African countries that had been producing the stuff for a few decades. In petro-states such Angola, Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea, billions of dollars had been siphoned, stolen and squandered, enriching elite ruling classes who generally ruled with an iron fist.

In the case of Equatorial Guinea, little has changed and many of the changes in other petro-states such as Angola are regarded as cosmetic. The bottom line is that the wealth generated by oil and gas in Africa has seldom trickled down into wider prosperity.

But the narrative was that oil and gas would transform the political economies of newly producing states, and the taps were primed to...