Petro-Governance as Colonial Extraction Engineering: Spectral Infrastructures, Resistance, and the Unfinished Afterlife of Empire in Africa’s Oil Regimes

Although all African states are formally independent, the continent, like much of the postcolonial Global South, “still breathes coloniality all the time and every day,” to borrow Maldonado-Torres’s evocative phrasing. Nowhere is this condition more striking than in the governance of oil. This study, therefore, interrogates the historical and structural foundations of Africa’s oil postcolonial regimes as afterlife projects of colonial extraction. Anchored in postcolonial theory, decolonial economic thought, and critical political economy, it advances the claim that African petro-governance was inaugurated on three colonial logics of structurelessness, imperial subterfuge and authoritarian managerialism. The analysis moves further to ask what continuities and discontinuities have these legacies encountered, and how they have shaped postcolonial ways of economic life, order, and political authority. Drawing on archival evidence, oral histories, and secondary sources, the study argues that colonial oil governance has reappeared in three spectral forms of institutional dependency, neocolonial economic rationality, and authoritarian statecraft. The argument, ultimately, is that African oil governance requires a fundamental rethinking to delinks it from these unfinished colonial projects and imagines discontinuities adequate to the demands of postcolonial equity, autonomy, and survival.