Africa’s drilling drive: A new boom, or the old mistakes repacked?
Source: Anton Petrus/Getty Images
The chant echoing across Africa’s oil corridors is unmistakable: Drill, baby, drill. From the Orange Basin in Namibia to Ghana’s Jubilee and Sankofa fields, and all the way to Angola, Libya and Egypt’s offshore and onshore blocks, African nations are moving swiftly to unlock their hydrocarbon wealth. The global energy transition is not waiting, and the continent has no intention of being left behind.
But the rush to extract - however justified by dwindling oil windows and development imperatives - cannot be allowed to repeat the failures of the past. Africa must ensure that this wave of drilling does more than line balance sheets or add to GDP figures. It must serve the people. This is not just about resource ownership. It’s about resource justice.
In Ghana, where former President John Mahama has called on oil companies to “pump like there’s no tomorrow,” the logic is straightforward: oil production has dipped from 196,000 barrels per day in 2019 to just over 132,000 in 2024. If Ghana is to avoid leaving wealth underground, action must be swift.
Kosmos Energy’s $2 billion investment, the Sentuo Refinery’s ramp-up, and new drilling initiatives are all part of a calculated sprint before the curtain closes on the oil era
But who truly benefits from this sprint?
Too often, the answer has been: not the citizen. In the euphoria of foreign direct investment and billion-dollar projects, local communities
risk being reduced to an afterthought. This is where the new resource nationalism
must evolve - not just to claim a larger share of revenue, but to guarantee structured, enforceable, and equitable local content frameworks. Namibia’s Prime Minister Elijah Ngurare made this point clearly at NIEC 2025: drilling must uplift Namibians. The same must
be true in Mozambique, Libya, Egypt, Ghana, and beyond.
We must ask hard questions: Will Ghana’s contractors and suppliers dominate the value chain, or will foreign firms reap the lion’s share? Will Ghanaian youth be trained and employed across the lifecycle of these projects - or will their only interaction be with the flares lighting up their skies? Are host communities in Axim, Esiama, or the Volta Basin being properly consulted and compensated, or bulldozed in the name of “national interest”?
The energy transition may not be an outright ban, as Dr. Tony Aubyn of the Petroleum Hub Development Corporation rightly argued at AETC 2025, but it is an inflection point. Africa’s right to develop its hydrocarbons must be fiercely defended - but so must the right of its people to benefit from them, sustainably. That means strong laws. Not vague frameworks, but legally binding instruments that mandate local content, environmental protection, fair compensation, and long-term investment in public goods.
It means implementation that doesn’t collapse under the weight of political convenience or elite capture. If these fundamentals are ignored, the continent risks reliving the curse of the Dutch disease - soaring revenues alongside jobless growth, social unrest, and environmental degradation. We risk building temporary refineries and drilling short-term wells while our agriculture, water bodies, and local industries slowly suffocate.
Africa has the right to drill. But it must also have the discipline to plan, to protect, and to distribute. Let this not be another missed moment. Let the drill be a tool of transformation - not a trigger for history’s repetition.
