ABSTRACT

Although the issue of rentierism and its impact on the dynamics of politics, society and development processes in the global South has received great attention from many scholars,1 there remains no definitive resolution of the resource curse debate, which is premised on the assumption that the availability of lootable strategic economic resources such as oil, diamond, gold, copper, timber and coltan contribute to precipitation and prolongation of insurgency conflict, thereby forestalling or undermining democracy. For example, in a study on the nexus between oil and democracy, Michael Ross concluded that oil ‘does greater damage to democracy in poor states than in oil-rich ones … even if exports are relatively small’ due to the deleterious impact of three crucial variables, namely: ‘taxation effect’, ‘repression effect’, and ‘modernization effect’ (Ross, 2000). Furthermore, Ross argues that the collective impact of these three variables on fiscal policies of the state ultimately impinges on the regime type, ‘hence governments that fund themselves through oil revenues and have larger budgets are more likely to be authoritarian; [while] governments that fund themselves through taxes … are more likely to become democratic’. Therefore, political formations or states, which entrench rigorous extraction capacities through taxation are candidates for the enthronement of democracy since there is ‘no taxation without representation’ (Yates, 1996, p. 34). However, in rentier formations, the absence of embedded state taxation capacities leads to the shrinking of the democratic space where rentier elites claim there can be ‘no representation without taxation’. Because social services in sectors such as education, health and infrastructure are provided by the state using the rent derived from oil exports, rentier elites constrain the prospects of mass participation in the political process. Thus, many rentier state theorists argue that one of the fundamental limitations of rentierism is that it asphyxiates the flourishing of democratic values through political despondency and departicipation. Furthermore, at the economic level, instead of production and extraction, the function of a rentier state is restricted to distribution and allocation of what has been described as ‘rentier largesse’ (Omeje, 2006, p. 11).