Corporate Relations in the Oil and Gas Sector in Africa

The book on why African energy projects fail on relationships and not on engineering. Written from eleven years inside a four-country pipeline.

Every operator in this region has the same story. The plant is built. The permits are current. The community development budget was spent in full. And the asset is still shut in.

I spent eleven years leading external relations for a gas transmission system running through Nigeria, Benin, Togo and Ghana. In that time I watched technically excellent projects fail for reasons no engineering review would ever surface, and I watched the corporate relations function get blamed for outcomes it was never given the authority to prevent.

This book is the account of why that happens and what it takes to stop it.

It deals with the things the compliance manual does not: why disbursement is not engagement, why a grievance mechanism nobody trusts is worse than none at all, why coordination across four sovereigns fails in the same three places every time, and what it actually takes to seat corporate relations at the point where project decisions are made rather than at the point where they are explained.

You will find it useful if you are:

• Leading corporate affairs, external relations, sustainability or community relations in energy, mining or infrastructure
• A project or asset director carrying schedule risk you cannot control from the site
• Working in a Ministry, Regulator or NOC designing host community and local content frameworks
• Assessing social risk on African infrastructure for a lender, fund or Development Finance Institution