The impetus for this book came from comments made by two people during the course of almost a decade. The first was in the spring of 1989, when a friend and colleague, Tajudeen Abdulraheem, noted during a discussion we had in his apartment at Oxford that natural resource management would be the key issue during the last decade of the twentieth century and even beyond, and that efforts should be invested into looking at how the management of these resources can affect politics in Africa. Tajudeen, then a Rhodes Scholar, was rounding up his doctoral studies at St. Peter's College Oxford, while I was then halfway through mine at King's College London. The second comment came in 1996. In an informal discussion that followed a lecture I gave at the Royal College of Defense Studies, London, one of the course participants raised a crucial point about the possible impact of natural resource management on security in Africa. Like Tajudeen seven years previously, he too opined that detailed studies into the complexities of resource politics in Africa would be crucial, if the continent was to be spared some of the conflicts that have characterized its postindependence existence. By the end of the 1990 decade, these two positions had been clearly vindicated, giving no additional need to draw anyone's attention to the obvious linkage between natural resources and conflict in Africa. What was even more frightening were the apocalyptic predictions being made in certain quarters that the years ahead would witness many more such conflicts, to further result in the weakening and collapse of state institutions in the continent.