Lethal violence is fact in Mathare. On the day I first visit the community, tweets hashtagged #CopRashidCorruptDeals appear on my Twitter feed. I already knew of Rashid, having watched the BBC documentary about him and his team. I follow the hashtag and find this tweet from a local journalist:  “Rashid has wiped all thugs around Eastleigh, Mathare and Huruma. To us residents he is a nice guy.” The journalist in question has twenty-three thousand followers.

I’ve only been in Mathare a matter of minutes when an invisible hand runs gently over the dome of my head. It’s a familiar, yet strange, feeling. I quickly realise that this is because it is neither my own hand, nor that of Inés, my wife. The hand actually belongs to a man standing behind me. Feeling vulnerable, I move away quickly, saying “COVID” in justification for my abruptness. “19”, he responds, completing my words. It’s a funny moment and I relax.

My new acquaintance is one of the many addicts who share a rubbish dump with a large number of highly energetic and boisterous children. The children have transformed a corner of the tip into a gymnasium. The gym includes a climbing frame/assault course (improvised from an abandoned wooden structure) and a springboard — a large black tyre — from which the tiny gymnasts gracefully launch themselves. The kids are well organised. They stand in a nice queue. There are fast ones, skilful ones and learners. After a quick sprint they hit the tyre with both feet. It projects them and they spin defiantly, airborne above the garbage for a split second, before landing on the piece of carpet that serves as a crash mat. Fans gathered to watch the spectacle make approving sounds for the best leaps and twists. The contrast between the shiny-eyed bounce of the children and the glazed stagger of the addicts is stark and saddening.

I’m in Mathare to visit members of the Mathare Empire collective. The enterprising young members of this group have recently occupied and redecorated an abandoned building at one end of the trash pile. Their porch provides front-row seats from which to watch the young athletes practice their somersaults. It is fittingly decorated with a painting of a child with huge boxing gloves and a stop-corona mask. This is one of several large and handsome murals depicting faces that gaze patiently over the dump.

Despite the distracting vivacity of the young gymnasts, the garbage heap is treacherous.  It almost swallowed up a little girl recently. The piles and layers of trash hide pools of rainwater, transforming the junk into something akin to a deadly swamp. The girl, running to greet her father, sunk into one such concealed crevice and began to go under. Quick-witted bystanders saved the day, plucking her out before she disappeared.

The purpose of my visit is to present and discuss projects in Rio de Janeiro, where I lived until recently. In Rio I first worked for Amnesty International, documenting and campaigning against human rights violations in some of the city’s 1000+ world-famous and, sadly, ultra-violent favelas. I later became involved in grassroots cultural and youth initiatives aiming to empower and raise the self-esteem of Rio’s young people and communities. This work is documented in a book titled Culture is Our Weapon and included a project by JR — a TED prize-winning French artist — called Women are Heroes. Most recently, in 2019, I helped to organise the construction of a skatepark in Maré, a neighbourhood made up of sixteen favelas originally constructed on swampland.

We have lots to talk about. While sharing ideas and stories with the group, I discover they have recently taken part in a video call with Raull Santiago, a prominent human rights defender from the Alemão (German) complex, one of Rio’s most violence-hit communities. The issues faced by the residents of Mathare and Alemão are similar yet different. Both are very big, but Mathare is much more densely populated and much poorer. While both places suffer violence, Alemão is a war zone. Both are built in a valley and are full of human endeavour and misfortune in equal measure. In both places young men, specifically, are at high risk of coming to a violent end.

We go for a walkabout. My guides show me how and where they have staked out green spaces, planted trees and painted structures with bright murals, (part of their work for the Mathare Green Movement). These actions bring levity and freshness into the often airless and monochromatic environment. I’m struck by their colourful imaginings of other universes on the walls of public toilets. Just one of these strong-smelling units can cater for the needs of five thousand Mathare residents. I also learn that the toilets are centres of socialisation — children’s friendship networks in Mathare are built around who shares the facility nearest your house. Kids playing in front of several of the vibrantly decorated loos that we visit demonstrate this. The pictures on the walls imagine other possibilities — outer space or lush tropical forests — while others remind users of their current terrestrial responsibilities: don’t forget your mask!

I suffer from sensory overload walking around Mathare. As in Rio, there are myriad sights, sounds and smells to take in all at once. Because of COVID-19, school is out when I visit. Children are everywhere. The community is spread across a gentle valley, not the steep escarpments of many favelas in Rio. Corrugated iron shacks — so close together that visually they form a vast iron sheet of rusted red, grey and brown — cover the slopes. The poverty is grinding. Narrow paths zigzag between lean-tos and rank smelling drains. Most of the shacks are low and many look as if they might fall down should you push them.

In contrast, residents are mostly well dressed and clean. Commerce, licit and illicit, crowds the pathways and thoroughfares. Cheap, ripe fruit and vegetables abound. I taste sweet pineapple and see watermelon, avocados, tomatoes, garlic, peppers and onions. Vendors hawk pastries, eggs and sausages. Cooks stir delicious smelling dishes over wood fires. In Rio, obesity in low-income communities is a serious issue. Here I’m impressed — most people in Mathare look healthy and strong.

We pass a wealth of legal, illegal, social, spiritual and commercial activities — khat stalls, illicit hooch making stills, drug dealing areas, NGOs, schools, churches, mosques and markets. Public soap dispensers and water for handwashing remind us that COVID-19 is ever-present, even though social distancing is impossible. Besides the sale of food there is plentiful commerce—mobile phone businesses, hardware shops, beauty salons, charcoal vendors, boda boda riders and stalls selling new and second-hand clothes. Authentic second-hand garments are considered infinitely more stylish than bogus new ones, I am informed. Fake clothes in Mathare = a serious fashion crime! It’s the same in Rio, where favela residents take pride in their appearance. However, Brazil does not have such an abundance of second-hand imports. And so in Rio, the emphasis is more often on an item’s newness, not necessarily its authenticity.

Yet despite the trading, hustle and bustle and a resilient-looking population, the overwhelming sensation I have in Mathare is that of risky living. I can only try and imagine the heat inside the shanties in high summer or what happens during the rains, when sewers flood and the metal shanties become dangerous because of electric shocks from exposed wiring. But although Mathare is economically poorer and less developed than similar communities in Rio, I do not feel suffocated by the inescapable threat of violence. In Rio’s battle-scarred favelas, gun-toting teenagers patrol the alleyways. Bullet holes in the masonry all around inform you that the weapons are not just for show. Violence is real and present and you are constantly reminded of this.

When I ask my guides about the tweet concerning Rashid they tell a very different story from that of the journalist who described him as “hero”. For young men in Mathare, Rashid is the grim reaper in human form and something of a shape shifter, known for his ability to camouflage himself and merge with the surroundings. He carries pictures of targets on his phone. Businesses pay him to go after miscreants. However, innocents, friends, associates or just the unlucky often end up dead.

The guys I am with are mostly in their early twenties. Statistically, they are the group most at risk from police violence. The presence of killer cops does not make them safer or protect them from crime. Local thieves, they tell me, refer to after dark as “office hours” and can even rob someone they know because those are “the rules and young thieves will take everything you have—even your girlfriend. They take drugs that make them fearless and immune to pain.” These include pills called “cosmos”, sold by local dealers. Cosmos pills come in different colours according to strength and stain the user’s lips. The tablets are apparently prescription medicine for mental illness, stolen from the public health system.

Law-abiding young men in Mathare live between a rock and a very hard place. When they talk about problems, conversation revolves around work and danger. While dignified employment is scarce, even for the well-educated, the threat of violence is permanent. Rashid — seen as something of an executioner-in-chief — exercises the power of life and death through his actions and their multiplication in the public imagination.

The youth in the favelas of Rio favela suffer from precisely the same issue. Police killings (extrajudicial executions by any other name) in the city are among the highest  — if not the highest — in the world. The slaughter takes place in the context of a so-called drug war whereby society overlooks illegal police action in return for perceived security. Young men in favelas are also at risk from gangs inside their communities who also kill without pity. Fierce and chaotic gun battles between police and lawbreakers very often leave behind victims of stray bullets. By the end of 2019, Rio’s police force had shot and killed 1,810 alleged suspects in supposed confrontations, the highest annual number on record and almost twice the 1,003 victims of police violence for the entire US that year. In 2020 lethal police violence and operations in favelas in Rio continue at full steam; they did not abate even under COVID-19 lockdown.

As in Nairobi, where some locals describe Rashid as a hero, the Brazilian media and public have long tolerated and encouraged extrajudicial executions as purported crime fighting. Typical practice is to execute a victim in a fake shoot-out. In just a few hours in February 2019, during a single operation in a favela, Rio police shot and killed 13 suspects. These included nine young men in a house, who, according to witnesses, were trying to give themselves up. However, sometimes they don’t even try to pretend — as was the case in a Rio suburb in 2005, when off-duty police in cars shot and killed 29 civilians in a single evening.

Widespread public consent for criminal state violence in Brazil is encapsulated in the popular saying “a good thug is a dead thug”, first adopted by police death squads operating in the 1960s at the beginning of the country’s 20-year military dictatorship. In 2018, future president Bolsonaro took the dictum to extremes by pledging to unleash waves of violence across the country when elected, saying, “if a policeman kills 10, 15 or 20 with 30 bullets each he must be decorated, not charged”. Other politicians followed suit, campaigning on explicit platforms of lethal violence. Despite the extremely high numbers of police killings, individual cases of which are rarely scrutinised, Bolsonaro committed to the introduction of new legal mechanisms to further protect killer police from investigation.

In Brazil, killer cops, drug traffickers and death squads have long terrorised low-income communities across the nation. In rural areas, local police and hired gunmen provide such a service. In cities and their peripheries, the absence of the state and lack of regulation in poor neighbourhoods and favelas offer a wealth of illicit opportunity. Whoever provides security in these areas can step in to control the local economy, provision of services and crucially, access to the electorate. Paramilitary groups, known in Rio de Janeiro as militia, have lately appropriated this model — a fusion of traditional politics, organised crime and territorial control. Usually linked to police, prison and fire services, today the militia operate in more than half of the city’s neighbourhoods.

Cameroonian political scientist Achille Mbembe has identified this process — the political management of vulnerable populations through their exposure to death — as “necropolitics”. Necropolitics clearly regulates life in Mathare as much as it governs Rio’s favelas. Police like Rashid are not there to fight crime. They defend a status quo.

When I am about to leave Mathare after my first visit, I have an indication of what the maintenance of this status quo entails. Two very burly policemen brandishing enormous sticks barge their way along the street and disappear behind some huts. People double their speed to get far away from them. Doors close and the street empties. Twilight falls. A palpable tension replaces the relaxed late Saturday afternoon coming and going. Onlookers inform me that the police are there to extort payment from vendors who sell glue and “jet fuel” — ultra-cheap ethanol for inhaling — to the crushed adults who converge on the garbage dump.

***

Thankfully, the next time I visit, there is a much more pleasant atmosphere in this corner of Mathare. The area outside the bungalow, as the Mathare Empire members call their HQ, is swept clean. Local and guest artists perform on a brightly coloured stage, made from pallets painted purple, red, yellow and green, to a hyped crowd who occupy the kids’ gymnasium at the edge of the dump. They talk, sing and rap about police violence and issues of the day, like COVID-19. But the event is not a political lecture and nor is it gloomy. The group had spontaneously decided that what was originally going to be a concert would instead be the first ever “Mathare Futurism Day” – a gathering of local painters, artists and musicians to celebrate community, address current issues and reimagine Mathare. “Moments like this”, Wyban Mwangi says, “remind people about the beauty of self-dignity and the constant need to struggle for a better, healthier and safer place to live”. In communities governed by necropolitics, such resistance provides vital hope, freedom and breathing space.

Growing up down south in the aftermath of the 1960s Negro Revolution in America was truly the best. During that period, three out of every four Black children in America were born in a two-parent home. By the 80s, that number would drop to one in every four.

Education and opportunity were becoming more accessible to black and brown communities everywhere. It would be the force that would get us out of the hole history had placed us in.

We were moving forward and everybody could feel it, but as much as I liked going to school and learning new things, my favourite memories are of when, after school, I got to spend time with my brothers and cousins. There was just something magical that happened when we were together.

We would meet over at grandma’s house in that part of the city we called the village. The village was a straight, two-block walk from school, down King Street, past the Piggly Wiggly store parking lot and then to the stoplight where you take a right turn onto Rommey Street, and another right on to what looks like a parking lot on the side of the church, and just at the bridge, before you crossed the old train track or you would have missed it, the entrance to the court. Thirty or so homes behind the old Methodist Church on a road invisible from the street laid out in the form of a horseshoe.

I cannot talk about the village without talking about the city and the state. Charleston, South Carolina is a peninsula city located on the South Carolina coastline. It was one of the thirteen original colonies and the very first state to break away from the Union, and one of the founding states of the Confederacy.

The village was a housing initiative following the 1964 Civil Rights Act aimed at breaking the cycle of poverty by moving Black families out of the old housing slums and projects and into new affordable homes.

The difference between the projects in the South and the projects up north is the space and design. In most cases, southern projects were designed to be communal properties, different from the stacked high-rises up north or in the Midwest.

The projects down south were simple properties where people learned to share. They shared the backyard when the sun got too high and the front when people just wanted to be outside and catch a breeze. Everybody knew one another and called each other by name. Family arguments, celebrations and losses spilled into neighbouring apartments causing people to act like one big extended family. And even though everybody was poor, they would have been hard-pressed to admit it. Poverty was a state of mind. The community spirit emphasised generosity and everything was shared. If you were hungry and didn’t have food, you could always ask next door.

Having lived in the projects for decades, my grandparents were one of the very first people to be offered a house in the village. I can remember the move like it was yesterday, everyone was so excited.

The year was 1973, I was eight years old. For the first time Black families in Charleston would have the chance of a normal life.

My grandparents, long into retirement, coupled with our large, extended family of cousins, uncles, aunts and three brothers – two older and one younger – were a great source of pride and joy until I learned that the American egalitarian beliefs which I thought were as perfect a foundation as there could be, were but an illusion, a well thought out scheme. We weren’t freed, we were just moving boxes.

Although everyone got their own private home, some did build fences around theirs but others opted against this, allowing for yards to overlap, creating a more open and vibrant community.

My grandparents had a high chain-linked fence, but there was still this sense of togetherness. When something went wrong in the village, the elders would be the first out to deal with it.

My exploration of the real workings of America would begin from within this village in 1976, the year that America celebrated its 200th anniversary of independence from British rule.

That year, I began to see that the ideals that gave birth to the idea of “We the People,” did not include people like me.

I remember a young militant uncle, oozing Black pride, spilling the beans and pointing out to me that neither he nor I, nor any of the millions of other Blacks had reason to celebrate America’s success.

As my White and Black classmates and a nation prepared for the grand July 4th spectacle that would include a  freedom train,  a scheduled stop in our city,  marching bands,  hotdogs, cotton candy and fireworks, I began my own re-education, reading keenly to understand the origins and the construct of the first Americans.

In the 200 years since the Protestant Christians invaded America they’ve enslaved millions, massacred the Indians, and everything we’ve suffered – the chains, the church bombings, our leaders assassinated, brothers lynched – all of it has been part of an elaborate scheme to keep Blacks subjugated.

In June 1740, the British Parliament passed the Naturalization Act of 1740 – the “Plantation Act” – into law.

In this decree, any White European Protestant alien who had been living in any of the thirteen colonies for seven years without being absent from that colony for more than two months, was deemed to be a natural-born citizen of the United Kingdom.

The Plantation Act of 1740 was a direct response to the September 1739 Stono River Slave Rebellion in South Carolina. The Stono Rebellion was the largest slave insurrection in British North America that culminated in the deaths of 25 colonists and about 50 Africans. It was led by an Angolan known as Jemmy and a band of about twenty slaves, who broke into a store, armed themselves and demanded their freedom. They marshalled a group of 60 slaves in an attempt to reach St Augustine in Florida, where the Spanish guaranteed freedom and land to any fugitive slave. The rebellion was crushed at Edisto River, 80 kms away from where the rebellion had started.

The 1740 law criminalised the Black experience itself, restricting the right of free movement, the right to free assembly, and the right to be educated or to earn money. These punitive and discriminatory laws created by men who claimed to be good Christians, legislated the right of plantations owners to even kill rebellious slaves.

Most colonialists considered themselves British until the year 1776 when resentment began to fester among the settlers. Frustrated by taxation and a lack of representation in the British Parliament, these new Americans declared war on their own government demanding independence.

That same year, the British-born political activist, pamphleteer and immigrant to the colonies, Thomas Paine, published a pamphlet titled Common Sense in which he argued the case for a new “America”.

“Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America. This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe.”

The American War of Independence was fought from 1776 to 1783.  Seven years later, the Naturalization Act of 1790, the first naturalization law of the new republic legislating who could be granted United States citizenship, was passed into law.

All Free White Persons of “good character” who had been residing in the United States for two years or longer could apply for US citizenship.  In effect, the law’s use of the phrase, “free white person” excluded blacks and immigrants of other races from being eligible for citizenship, and most importantly, for protection under the laws of the court.

As a child I had drank the Kool-Aid and believed that it was peaceful cooperation between the pilgrims and the native Indians that had established the widely practiced Thanksgiving holiday tradition.

I recall summers spent playing cowboys and Indians with my brothers. We took turns at who got to play the Indian. I felt no shame striking the Indians down with my rifle. They were always the bad guys, raiding the poor settlers’ forts, attacking their caravans. But I was baffled by the contradictions. Why would the Indians save the pilgrims who were dying from the cold and hunger only to try to escape from them later? It just didn’t make much sense.

Then it came to me: the Native Americans were fighting to protect their land. We weren’t playing a game; what we were doing was re-enacting a massacre. Over five million Native Americans were killed before the West was conquered.

Regardless the age at which one arrives at truth and understanding, it is always disorienting and disheartening. I’ve found that whether one accepts it or not, the only thing we can be certain of in this world of uncertainty is change.

I spoke with many people after the first 2020 Presidential Debate between President Trump and the Democratic nominee former Vice President Joe Biden that took place in the midst of heightened racial tensions and the COVID-19 pandemic. I got many mixed views regarding the outcome of the debate; some were shocked by the childish display while others dug in, taking sides and displaying party loyalty like it was a football game. Of the many reactions I got, one zoom call from home with my older brother really got me thinking.

“Can you believe that man?”

My older brother is now 60.

I had noticed him wiping his eyes.

I asked, “What ‘s wrong?”

At first he didn’t (want to) speak, he just kept brushing the tears away, then he began,

“Little brother, we grew up together,” he said.

“We pretty much had the same childhood, but I’ll tell you, I have never had any white person call me a nigger or spit on me like these guys up here in Philadelphia tell me they have. I have had White teachers down south who were some of the nicest people you’d want to meet. But, looking at that debate last night and the President of the United States refusing to denounce white supremacy as racist, I just never, you know, thought White people hated us that much.”

I empathised with him because I knew the pain of sacrifice, service, abandonment, rejection and betrayal.

I joined the US Military at seventeen to prove my allegiance to the ideals that made America great in my mind, but war in a foreign land far away from the ones I loved taught me the truth about service and the value of my life.

My brother and I grew up five years apart in a changing post-civil rights America. We were kids of the Kool-Aid generation, the first of our kind. We had opportunities our parents could only have dreamt of. We were the hope of a brighter future, a brighter America. A post-civil rights America.

In the 1960s, the far right party was a party bent on preserving the privileges of natural-born Whites in America, Jim Crow’s America. However, during the 1960s a new consciousness emerged as young White Americans took to the streets to say that they had seen the attack dogs set on peaceful protesters and wanted a better America. In January 1961, a young President-elect  of Irish descent and a wealthy practicing Catholic would become the embodiment of the American dream and challenge the good American Christians to look into their hearts and minds and begin anew to create a better nation where the rights of every American, White and non-White, were protected under the laws of the land.

With a rousing inauguration day speech, JFK inspired Americans to think better of themselves, to think higher of themselves: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country.” He had spoken and the people spoke back. My parents gave me his middle name because they believed life for Blacks in America would be different.

But, in November of 1963, the 46-year-old president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was gunned down by a lone gunmen while out in Texas promoting his ideas of equality to the American people.

This is America

My brother was crying because it was hard for him to accept people could be so calculating and one so naive. He, like so many others, wanted badly to believe in a land blessed by God.

I was twelve years old when my big brother left home. He moved up north straight out of high school, where he built a career and retired as a professional chef.  He found love, family and set up a home up north. But in the Trump years, the scales fell from his eyes.

“I never had a racist moment down south, not like the kind of racist moments these guys tell me they’ve encountered here in Philly. I mean I just never believed White people hated us that much.”

I knew the anguish, the shock.  We Blacks down south don’t complain, we see but at the same time we’ve learnt not to see.

My grandma in the village used to say, “You can’t feed into the darkness. You can’t demand anyone to know what you know, to understand what you understand. People see what they want to see. People come to truth when they come to it and not a second before.”

But what you don’t do is stop living.

Natural resource wealth has massive potential and can hugely impact the economy of a country. The natural resource sector and more particularly the petroleum and mining industry is distinguishable from other sectors of the economy in that ventures in this sector are high-risk and prone to failure if not competently undertaken. Moreover, resources in the sector are typically immovable and must be exploited on the site of their discovery.

Being exhaustible and non–renewable, these resources call for prudent exploitation and management that must also factor in intergenerational equity. And unlike other industries, the exploitation of natural resources is community-based, in the sense that the activity takes place inside communities, providing opportunities for conflict as the business pursuits of an investor threaten the general welfare of the community.

Despite the lucrative nature of the sector, it comes with a number of challenges. Learning from the many countries that have experienced the “resource curse”, it is imperative that from the outset, the following issues are taken into consideration if at all a country wishes to progress and develop through the proceeds of its natural resources.

First, a country endowed with mineral resources should always plan to diversify its economy using the proceeds from its mineral wealth. This is done to avoid the Dutch disease and to ensure that the economy can withstand shocks caused by fluctuating prices. Venezuela and Nigeria are two countries that experienced economic recession due to a fall in the price of oil.

Second, while mineral exploration and production automatically comes with a high pollution risk, there is need take contingency measures to mitigate any such damage. Deliberate steps need to be taken to avoid the Niger Delta situation where land has been so degraded that the cost of cleaning up is estimated at £900 million.

Third, the phrase “resource curse” arises from the many cases where the discovery of minerals has resulted in retrogression instead of progress for the communities within which the commodity has been found. More often than not, these host communities experience conflict when the expected benefits are not realised, sometimes because of unrealistic expectations but more often because of corruption. It is important for investors and communities to engage from the outset, ideally with the government facilitating the process. Increasingly, however, civil society and religious organisations are stepping in to fill the gap left by unresponsive governments.

It is clear that natural resource wealth can provide opportunities for countries to improve the living standards of their people and can positively impact the development of nations. Indeed, it is a commonly held belief that nations richly endowed with natural resources are more advantageously positioned to shape the economic, physical and social aspects of their development than those less endowed.

However, the paradox of plenty has been the subject of extensive research by scholars and practitioners precisely because many resource-rich countries are associated with increased poverty levels, civil war, reduced economic growth, greater inequality and social injustice. This is because of a lack of goodwill to develop other sectors of the economy that are not necessarily dependent on natural resources, among other factors.

There are however, countries that can be cited for having taken off successfully.  Norway, one of the world’s richest economies, and Botswana, one of the largest producers of gemstones, have both clearly demonstrated how natural resources can be harnessed to foster development, build the economy and generally improve people’s livelihoods.

Conversely, countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, with its has huge deposits of natural resources including cobalt which is highly sought after and is of great economic value, and Angola, with its vast reserves of natural gas, are examples of how resources can come to be regarded as a curse due to the civil wars, conflicts, under-development, low GDP, and the many other problems associated with these nations despite being resource-rich.

A number of academic studies also suggest that natural resource wealth slows down the economic growth of a country. This narrative is however challenged by countries like Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and Taiwan which, despite being modestly endowed, have invested the revenue from their limited natural resources in the areas of education and research, have strengthened their policy and legal frameworks and institutions, and established parameters for advancing wealth creation and multiplication, as well as savings for the future generations.

Many theories have been advanced in an attempt to explain the resource trap in mineral rich countries. However, none of the hypotheses advanced has identified the root cause of the paradox of resource abundance. This is because, by themselves, natural resources cannot be classified as either a curse or a blessing; they are opportunities that prudently exploited can jumpstart an economy and bring long-term fiscal benefits to a country.

Unfortunately, a majority of resource-rich countries are anti-democratic and have opaque policies and institutions. Predatory governance, greed and corruption often lead to the signing of secretive and exploitative production contracts that only benefit the investing multinationals and their countries of origin.

However, there are many tried and tested strategies and approaches that have resulted in strong economies with stable and functioning governments. For mineral wealth to have a positive impact and be a blessing there must be transparent policies, reasonable public regulation, commodity flows and sustainable and varied production systems.

A good example is the resource-rich state of Alaska in the United States where 9.6 billion barrels of oil were discovered in 1969. That year Alaska collected US$900 million from the oil lease sales but all the money was soon squandered. Worried that money from the oil resources would go to waste and benefit just a few, Alaskans voted to have the proceeds spent on state development.

Seven years later, and with infrastructure development largely achieved, a public vote established the Alaska Permanent Fund through a constitutional amendment. The fund was designed to receive at least 25 per cent of the oil revenue and in 1982 a dividend programme was added to the fund. The sovereign wealth component promotes and ensures intergenerational savings while the dividend fund ensures that all residents of Alaska enjoy the fruits of their natural resources by receiving annual dividends in the form of cash transfers. Since the first deposit of US$734,000 was made in 1977, the fund had over US$64 billion dollars in 2019 with each resident of Alaska receiving US$1,606 in dividends that year.

From the example above, it is very clear that a country can truly develop using its natural resource wealth. One of the ways in which it can do this is by securing tenure rights to natural resources through regulations that determine who can use the natural resources, for how long and under what conditions. Tenure rights clearly specify the expectations of each stakeholder with regards to their roles and, importantly, the role that the hosting communities are going to play during the entire period of the extraction of the resource.

Contract transparency is another way in which good governance can prevail in the extractive industry. Resource extraction contracts signed between the host governments and the multinational companies should be made public to provide general information to the public and ensure transparency, scrutiny and accountability.

There are countries, like Ghana, that support the idea of contract transparency as a fundamental principle in managing their extractive industry, but many nations have not fully embraced the idea of contract transparency for fear of sparking public outrage and also to conceal the information for personal gain. Through contract transparency, everything that is in the contract is laid bare and the specific expectation from every stakeholder is made public. This promotes good governance and transparency and also ensures that the benefits trickle down to the community level, promoting sustainable development.

Creation of a strong regulatory and institutional framework is also another way of ensuring good governance in the management of natural resources. The legal or regulatory framework can either enhance or inhibit development in the extractive industry and there is no template for what needs to be done in order to ensure a strong legal and regulatory framework. Each country has a unique opportunity to come up with its own tailor-made legal and regulatory framework that works for it and this involves developing laws and regulations that address specific issues in the industry while at the same time safeguarding the interests of the communities and  incorporating international best practices.

Having competent and functional institutions to implement the laws and regulations is another important step towards ensuring good governance in the management of the extractive industry. For the enacted laws to be effective, they must be implemented by institutions that are proactive and competent. Narrowing the implementation gap by ensuring that what is happening on the ground is in tandem with the provisions of the law is one of the critical roles of functional institutions.

A strong civil society can help in ensuring good governance in the management of natural resources.  Civil society organisations provide information and have the moral legitimacy to set the resource governance agenda. They can help to democratise power in resource management, and can work to keep other resource governance actors like governments and companies accountable. The civil society plays many roles, among which is the monitoring role, where it ensures that all the state and non-state actors play their role effectively in the management of resources and, more importantly in monitoring and ensuring that benefits are realised at the community level. They also help in highlighting corrupt practices in the industry and non-adherence to the internationally recognised practices guiding the extractive sector. Civil society organisations also have a role in representing the views of ordinary citizens on issues of national importance, in this case the extractive industry.

Lastly, civil society also plays a role in setting the agenda to ensure that the interests of the public in general, and development, are given priority. According to the Institute of Global Environmental Strategies Report of 2007, governments are increasingly involving local communities and non-governmental organisations in the management of natural resources. The ways in which the different stakeholders are involved varies. In involving different stakeholders, the governments broaden the scope of engagement and possibly minimise the chances of achieving a negative impact, reduce conflict and increase efficiency in resource management.

And finally, natural resources cannot be discussed without mentioning the environment. In an effort to benefit from the natural resource wealth while dealing with environmental issues, the following principles should be considered: All decisions made must be anchored in best governmental practice in order to ensure best practice in perpetuity. Resources must also benefit communities away from the resource as the impact of pollution may be felt away from the immediate location of the activity. Where there is no scientific evidence of possible impact, an investor should provide contingency measures and where such evidence of possible impact on the environment exists—usually through an Environmental Impact Assessment—an investor must formulate measures to avoid harming the environment and a polluter must sufficiently compensate for harm caused. We must give future generations the same opportunity to have access to a healthy environment that we as a generation have been given.

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The article is done with support from Diakonia Kenya Country Office under the Madini Yetu Wajibu Wetu (Our Minerals, Our Responsibility) Project. Views expressed in the article are those of the author.