Borrow against tomorrow’s barrels to pay today’s bills. Chad did it, Congo did it, Gabon did it again in April. The mechanism is legal, expensive and almost impossible to see from the outside. An oil-backed loan is simple in principle. A state, or its national oil company, receives cash now from a commodity trader or...

Cameroon has added the largest hydropower plant in its history. Households still count their outages in hours per day. The gap between generation and supply is where the money goes missing. Central Africa’s electricity problem is usually described as a shortage of generation. That description is increasingly wrong, and Cameroon is the clearest case. The...