Have you ever known anyone who’s sitting on a gold pot that they just can’t figure out how to open? Meet Tanzania.

Africa’s poverty has a real chance of being erased by major recent discoveries of natural resources, and no country has more new discoveries than Tanzania.

I know first-hand how fast Tanzania is developing. We operated a safari in just the last few weeks for a dozen Chinese managers of a new uranium plant in Dar.

Titanium and coltan have also been discovered recently, and Tanzania continues to sit on an unexploited massive vein of gold that is reckoned to be the second largest in the world after South Africa.

And most recently was the discovery of natural gas.

Just a few months ago, the IMF published findings that Tanzania could be earning $5-6 billion annually by the end of the next decade from an estimated 51 trillion cubic feet.

That’s where the good news ends.

Tanzania has botched exploitation of almost all of its natural resources, gold being the best example. Since its discovery near Lake Victoria nearly two decades ago, multiple companies have traded ownership and management, and reasonable production has yet to be attained.

Uranium is the next best example. The Chinese are successfully mining it, but the squandered tax revenue from it, and the corruption involved in the land that was swapped and sold for the mines is unbelievable.

And now there’s natural gas.

Lo and behold some observers think that the successful bidder to start developing the resource, the Norwegian company, Statoil, has ripped the country off royally.

The Production Sharing Agreement that Tanzania signed with Statoil “could [cost the government] hundreds of millions of dollars a year” according to a principal of the East African watchdog organization, Taweza.

It’s truly a mystery why Tanzania, which could be one of the richest countries in Africa, continues to be one of the poorest.

Some suggest corruption, and to be sure there’s a lot of that in Tanzania. Particularly with mineral rights transparency is easy to avoid. There is no legislative committee – as there should be – which oversees mineral right negotiation. It’s the Minister and his cronies.

That would be easily remedied by a better legislature, and it is coming round but terribly slowly.

In a confusing tweet last week Tanzanian opposition politician, Zitto Kabwe said, “not a single developing country that derives the bulk of its export earnings from oil and gas is a democracy.”

Is Kabwe suggesting he must trade his ideology, his outspoken democratic opposition to the current Tanzanian regime, to eliminate poverty? In other words: the current Tanzanian regime portraying itself as a democracy facilities wanton corruption?

Is there a Marxian dialectic here?

I’m not sure but it’s the handful of people like Kabwe who might be able to force Tanzania into some kind of meaningful grappling of its very rich resources.

But don’t pop the champaign just yet.