It is a golden opportunity: billions of dollars in windfall earnings for a clutch of African countries thanks to sky-high oil prices.
The International Monetary Fund reckons Africa's oil producers should gain around $15 billion per year for every $10 rise in crude prices and insist they should use the money to cut poverty, build infrastructure and achieve sustainable growth.
But the windfall also carries risks of economic overheating and inflation as a result of large spending programmes, and the potential to fan corruption, especially with funds likely to go to the notoriously opaque construction sector, analysts say.
On his second visit to the continent in three months as IMF managing director, Rodrigo Rato said last week the fund was talking to oil producing countries to ensure they spend the extra cash in a transparent way that helps the poor.
"The challenge throughout the Gulf of Guinea is for a greater awareness of how much money is actually brought in by oil and gas to the governments, as a pre-factor before you can then say 'you have that money, how do you now spend it?'," said Alex Vines, head of the Africa programme at Britain's Royal Institute for International Affairs.
Sub-Saharan Africa's biggest oil producers, Nigeria and Angola, ranked in the last 10 of Transparency International's 2003 corruption perception survey. Third biggest Equatorial Guinea was not even ranked in the survey due to lack of data.
But there are reasons for optimism, especially in Nigeria, which has set aside $2.5 billion in extra earnings from exporting crude at prices above its budgeted $25 per barrel. US crude contracts have reached nearly $50 last month.
Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala says sticking to the $25 a barrel budget has helped balance the books, and insists the windfall cash will be spent on new infrastructure and social projects to alleviate poverty in Africa's most populous nation.
Even Rato concedes such big cash injections into developing economies pose macroeconomic and inflationary risks - fears shared by some analysts.
"There is a lack of absorbative capacity, the system is not capable of managing a large inflow of funds efficiently. The moment the windfall is spent we are going to see some serious overheating in the economy," said Bismarck Rewane of the Financial Derivatives Company in Lagos.
Rewane also worries that despite efforts to improve accountability under a fiscal responsibility bill, the windfall cash may not be put to best use once it is channelled through Nigeria's 36 states and 774 local governments.
"There will be a long process of persuasion, training and educating to go from the reckless ways of the past to the prudent ways of the future," he said. "You can have as many acts as you want but the question is who is going to enforce them."
Angola also has a long way to go to improve transparency and efficiency in spending oil dollars, but Robert Bunyi, economist on the Africa desk at South Africa's Standard Bank, said the IMF would have extra leverage on the government as it negotiates a lending programme that should unblock bilateral aid.
Angola has budgeted for $23 a barrel, and the deputy prime minister said last week higher prices brought in $275 million extra in the first six months, saying higher estimates in excess of $1 billion from some analysts were wrong.
Government sources say much of the windfall cash is being channelled straight into paying off expensive oil-backed loans taken out during a civil war that lasted nearly three decades.
But one donor source told Reuters that despite Angola's progress towards better transparency, there was little chance the windfall would make a difference any time soon for Angola's 13 million people, most of whom live in abject poverty.
More than 70 percent of them live on less than $1 a day.
Equatorial Guinea, Africa's fastest-growing oil producer in recent years with only between 500,000 and a million inhabitants, should in theory be able to use its burgeoning revenues to best effect to improve the lot of its people.
But with a history of corruption and criticism over human rights abuses, oil has yet to make much of an impact on the lives of its citizens beyond a privileged ruling elite.
"In Equatorial Guinea, there is a tendency to spend money on large construction projects. There isn't much sense of trickle-down," said Vines.
A group of foreigners is on trial for trying to topple the government in conjunction, illustrating the security problems that have long gone hand in hand with resource riches in Africa.
"Companies are concerned, the IMF is concerned about it, Western govts are concerned about it, because if there isn't any trickle-down, you can't expect any greater stability in these places," said Vines. "People get increasingly frustrated."
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