At the beginning of the of the last oil boom in 2007, I read a Time Magazine article entitled ”The World's Most Expensive City” about the town Port Gentil located on the coast of Gabon. (http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1599163,00.html). It painted a vivid picture of a latter-day mineral boom town suffering a severe inflationary bubble and consequently awash and drowning in petro dollars with all the associated vice-y excesses. The resource curse is, however, double-edged. When the oil price tanked in 2014, the effects soon followed and three years from the 2014 crash Port Gentil presented a very different type of “ville petrolier” than it had in 2007. Arriving at the small airport from Libreville you notice oil company charters are still going strong ferrying oil workers to the fields. One consequence of the down turn was the flight
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