Governments pick the winners and losers every day. Rarely is the case clearer than when ruling parties take decisions about how natural resource wealth will be shared between governments, companies and other stakeholders.
While the nationalisation debate gets revived again in South Africa, and Nigerian petroleum-industry reforms include measures to give 10 per cent of the revenue from oil fields to local communities in the Niger Delta, the Zimbabwean government partakes in another expropriation draped in the language of economic justice. These debates are set to continue throughout the year ahead.
In Zimbabwe, the partners of the shaky unity government are at each other's throats over the implementation of indigenisation regulations. The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) accuses President Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front of using the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act to benefit party supporters at the expense of ordinary Zimbabweans.
Defending the new law, indigenisation minister Saviour Kasukuwere told The Africa Report criticisms of it were just pre-election politicking. "What we are doing is to correct an anomaly. This programme is meant to deal with historical economic injustices that saw foreigners controlling most, if not all, of the country's economic sectors, yet our people have been reduced to mere labourers, slaves in their own country."
Platinum giant Zimplats has offloaded part of its shareholding, giving $10m to Chegutu-Mhondoro-Ngezi-Zvimba Community Share Ownership Trust. But Mugabe said he had hoped Zimplats would give away more resources. Old Mutual also agreed to follow the indigenisation regulations by releasing 10 per cent of its shares to policyholders. Zimbabweans living in areas that do not host foreign-owned businesses have complained they will get little from the new legislation. In response, Kasukuwere has said his ministry would soon launch a national sovereign wealth fund.
The South African government has been running its Black Economic Empowerment policy for more than a decade, but Zimbabwe's new policy is less expertly drafted and thus at least as likely to create a class of powerful local oligarchs linked to the ruling party than trickle down to a broad-based middle class. Kasukuwere has already started doling out exemptions to companies from preferred countries such as China, South Korea and India, creating local losers and foreign winners.
In May 2011, the Namibian government made its claim to a greater stake of the country's mining industry by declaring coal, copper, gold, uranium and zinc as strategic minerals. Companies that want new licences for these minerals will have to form joint ventures with the parastatal Epangelo Mining Company.
Zambia's new president, Michael Sata, argues that mining companies need predictability and that windfall taxes are not the way forward. The new government has an overtly pro-poor economic platform, and the nationalisation debate has not reared its head. Zambia has been there and done that. The subsequent privatisation drive may have left a bitter taste of a job badly done (with some deals now being reinvestigated by the Sata administration), but there is no desire for the state to take back control.
More innovative solutions, like the 10 per cent stake for local communities in the Niger Delta, pose their own problems. If there are not strong institutions to manage the funds, the programme could do more harm than good. It may be a long time before such measures are implemented, with Nigeria's states and federal government squabbling over the creation of a sovereign wealth fund and the management of revenue.
As populations in Tunisia and Egypt push governments to be more accountable, governments south of the Sahara realise they must focus on getting companies to contribute more to national development priorities, boosting revenues in the process.
