ABSTRACT
This chapter describes about Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso, Venezuela's oil minister in the 1960s and one of the founders of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), was indeed prescient in his early statement. The two major "black boxes" are the revenue from extractive resources such as oil or precious gems, and military and security spending. In Africa there is a "paradox of plenty": abundant resources and thus high average income per capita coexist with high poverty and low levels of human development. The corruption is highest and regulatory control is weakest in countries with abundant extractive resources, with Equatorial Guinea as the worst and Botswana the only exception. Standards for extractive resource management are found in the Fiscal Transparency Code developed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2014. The corruptive influence of military equipment imports in a developing country is next only to that from large extractive resources such as oil.
