In 2007, a major oil discovery off Ghana's Atlantic coast did something remarkable before a single barrel was lifted: it made Ghana a different country. Credit ratings improved. Borrowing costs fell. IMF growth forecasts were revised upward. The government, parliament, and the public all absorbed a new truth — Ghana was about to become rich.

Fourteen years, three IMF bailout programmes, and one of sub-Saharan Africa's most severe debt crises later, Ghana had lost an estimated 21 per cent of the potential GDP per capita it should have accumulated in the decade following discovery. Oil production eventually arrived — but it arrived into a country that had already spent the revenues it was supposed to generate, borrowed against production profiles that proved optimistic, and made wage and subsidy commitments that proved impossible to reverse.

This is the presource curse. Not the resource curse — that familiar story about Dutch disease and institutional erosion that follows sustained extraction. The presource curse operates in the gap before production begins: in the years between discovery announcement and first revenue, when expectations have shifted but accountability mechanisms have not yet caught up.

Why the discovery window is different

The core insight is that anticipated wealth changes behaviour just as powerfully as actual wealth — but without the constraint that actual revenues impose. When revenues flow, there is at least a budget to discipline. When revenues are merely expected, the constraint is the forecast. And forecasts, as the evidence makes clear, are systematically too optimistic.

Research tracking IMF World Economic Outlook projections around major resource discoveries finds that growth forecasts are revised upward by roughly one percentage point in the years following a significant find — even though actual growth does not respond. The optimism is not random noise. It is a persistent, institutional bias that shapes the fiscal environment in which governments make decisions. Debt sustainability analyses anchored to those forecasts make borrowing look safe that is not. Credit ratings that incorporate anticipated revenues make commercial debt accessible at terms that later prove unsustainable.

The result is a classic borrowed tomorrows dynamic: governments spend and borrow against a future that arrives later than projected, produces less than expected, and comes into a fiscal environment that has already consumed the room to absorb disappointment.

The mechanism is not unique to oil

The presource curse is not a petroleum story. Mozambique's 2009 gas discoveries triggered the same dynamics — elevated expectations, premature borrowing, hidden debt accumulated against revenues that had not yet materialised — leading to a debt crisis in 2016 that halved growth and from which the country has still not fully recovered. Zambia accumulated debt across copper price cycles, repeatedly borrowing against commodity projections that proved incorrect. Senegal entered first oil production in 2024 with $7 billion in previously unreported liabilities already on its books.

The pattern is also emerging in critical minerals. The Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and a dozen other low-capacity states are now entering the presource window for cobalt, lithium, nickel, and rare earths — driven by energy transition demand. The discoveries are real. The expectations are rising. The borrowing has begun in several cases. The institutional capacity to manage the window has not materially changed since Ghana's oil era.

What can be done

The presource curse is not fate. Botswana avoided it — though partly through luck of timing and institutional quality that most resource-discovering LMICs do not possess. The interventions that matter are largely institutional and anticipatory: fiscal rules that bind during the presource window, not just post-production; independent revenue forecasting that resists political pressure to use optimistic scenarios; parliamentary controls on sovereign borrowing within a defined discovery window; and communication strategies that manage public expectations explicitly rather than allowing them to anchor on official optimism.

The challenge is that all of these interventions need to happen before the crisis — before the borrowing commitments are made, before the wage bill has expanded, before the political economy of promises has locked in an adjustment path that no government wants to be the one to impose.

That is what 'just in time' policy advice means in practice. Not advice delivered to a country already in an IMF programme, but advice delivered in the years between the press conference announcing a major discovery and the moment when the fiscal decisions that will define the next decade are made. The window exists. The question is whether the research, the evidence, and the institutional capacity to use it will be ready.

"The oil was real. The growth was borrowed — from a future that never quite arrived."