BRIEFING: "Africa's prospects: Opportunity knocks; With world markets in turmoil, an unexpected and overlooked continent may benefit from its very isolation," The Economist, 11 October 2008. WORLD NEWS: "Africa's Potential to Sate World's Oil Demand Dims," by Peter Fritsch, Wall Street Journal, 22 October 2008.

First story notes the usual headlines (insurgency in Nigeria, Mugabe's latest outrage, Sudan's war crimes indictments, Somalia's sad story, and the ANC's sad decline in South Africa), and yet, when you look at the 48 countries as a whole, we're talking a "period of unparalleled economic success." Most important: "despite the turmoil in the world's financial markets, international investors still think they can make money there." The uptick due to? Combo of better macro econ policies locally, big inflows of Western aid and investment, plus some debt relief—plus some untold flow of FDI from Asia (China esp) and the SWFs out of the Gulf. Taken as total, the IMF says investments and loans in/to Africa balloon from $11B in 2000 to $53B in 2007. Big push, indeed, and the best kind. Commodities boom is a major trigger, and so any downturn in demand will eventually hurt the continent, but longer term we see that "China and the Gulf states have been fascinated for some time by Africa, and there is no reason why this should end." China leads the way, but India is close behind. I write about this in Great Powers, leveraging the recent and most-excellent World Bank report ("Africa's Silk Road"—also cited here). The U.S. is mostly ghettoized in the Gulf of Guinea and Angola, according to the article. The downside is the continued population growth, so you've got the angry, bored, underemployed male problem. See this in Kenya and Ethiopia. Sub-Saharan Africa is the one area of the world scheduled to have significant growth still through 2030, meaning it keeps a very young profile (unlike the middle-aging Middle East, for example). Cited as rising stories—sans natural resource wealth—are Ghana, Mozambique. Article ends with a nice word for the Millennium Challenge Account. WSJ story presents the current dark-side economic projection: usual endemic challenges + credit crunch globally will depress Africa's ability to meet its potential on oil production. Africa tends to have shallow basins, and that, plus the high local costs and political uncertainty, when combined with international price swings, always keeps the place in the iffy category. Right now Africa is about 12% of global production of 85 million barrels a day, and in a tight production environment, every source counts. Efforts are split between extraregional NOCs (national oil companies) from Asia and the Mideast, the usual Western supermajors and mid-level players, and Africa NOCs (smallest of three).