By Toyin Akinosho
I arrived Félix-Houphouët-Boigny International Airport at 3am, in the morning, looking forward to seeing the lay of the land in the next several days and talking to a number of people about the looming hydrocarbon boom.
It had been 24 years since my last visit.
This early May 2024 trip had been prompted by reports-and their aftermath- of three discoveries of hydrocarbon accumulations, estimated at over 7Billion barrels of crude oil and gas equivalent in place in water depths ranging from 1,200 to 2,700 metres.
Nowhere else has this scale of discovery happened in Africa in the last 10 years than in Namibia, which now hosts the largest constellation of hydrocarbon super majors on the planet.
In the late 1990s, Cote d’Ivoire promised the world it would be a hub of oil and gas activity in the medium term.
It didn’t happen.
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I’d once constructed a theory, in my head, that the capital city of an African country that has recently stumbled on large oil and gas deposits would look a certain way. But I have always been disappointed. I was disappointed by the dourness of the Accra scene when I visited Ghana in 2008, a year after the couple of fields that were eventually collectively christened ‘Jubilee’ was discovered. Less than two weeks before this trip to Abidjan, I was in Windhoek, Namibia, a place whose midday pace of activity, even at main street level, was underwhelming.
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I finally located the headquarters of (the state hydrocarbon company) Petroci, not in a swank, posh corner of the city, but in the busy downtown. It’s the same downtown area that hosts the headquarters of the African Development Bank, but it doesn’t look anywhere as bespoke as the headquarters of Ghana National Petroleum Corporation in Tema, NNPC Towers in Abuja, Sonangol’s headquarters in Luanda, or even PetroSA’s head office building in Cape Town.
