1. IntroductionDespite the presence of many natural resources, many resource-rich countries are poor, because they do not have enough capital, human resources and technical opportunities to produce them independently. They also have poor management in controlling, distributing and reinvesting resources, which reveals that people as owners of national resources do not engage and participate in the country's resource distribution policy. Nowadays many African countries such as Central African Republic, Ghana, Senegal, Liberia etc. they have numerous mineral resources, especially oil. This natural resource represents a great opportunity for development and improvement of the socio-economic condition of every African country. Countries that have natural resources should have a high quality of life. One of the measures of high quality of life is gross domestic product (GDP). However, according to World Bank (2012) research “Gross Domestic Product 2012” many African countries have low GDP, for example Senegal has 14,160 million US dollars of GDP per capita, Central African Republic has 2,139 million US dollars of GDP per capita capita. Liberia has only $1,767 million in GDP per capita. Why are these countries, despite their enormous natural resources, so poor?2. Three obstacles on the path to prosperityA. Lack of human resources and technical opportunitiesOne of the main reasons for this is the lack of human capital that helps produce oil. The production of natural resources requires many highly skilled people, such as engineers, technologists, operators etc. Many international companies employ well-educated and well-experienced staff in this field, so Africans only work as workers. For example, according to Oxfam... half the paper... from natural resources equally among the country's population. Third, they lack democratic principles and a developed civil society that ensures transparency in decision-making and control of the distribution of revenues from natural resources. Furthermore, if we remember our main question of the topic, we can conclude that having a natural resource means being poor is a consistent pattern while the country does not solve the three problems mentioned above. References1. http://databank.worldbank.org/data/download/GDP.pdf2. Eliminate the resource curse. How the poor can and should benefit from revenues from extractive industries//Oxfam Briefing Paper, December 2009, p.123. D. Onigbinde. Natural resource management and its implications on national and sub-regional security: the case of the Niger Delta//KAIPTC Occasional Paper no. 22, September 2008, p..3