LONDON – Whoever wins the Liberian election, which now goes to a second round, will confront the question: how can Liberia avoid a resumption of politics-as-plunder?

Charles Taylor, Liberia’s and Africa’s plunderer (and murderer)-in-chief, may be off the scene but the interim government that has presided over Liberia in the preparations for the recent elections has shown that raping raw material resources is deep in the sinews of Liberian politics. In March, a UN panel reported that Liberian officials had signed a secret contract with a European company that gave it a virtual monopoly to sell Liberian diamonds, even though Liberia has been banned from selling its diamonds by the UN until the UN certifies that transparent and accountable procedures are being followed.

Although the two front-runners in Liberia’s presidential contest are known for their probity and integrity and doubtless will want to get on top of the problem, the second and third layers of government will be another matter. What remains of a decimated civil service is corrupt to the core and so are the wheelers and dealers who will crowd in, offering their services to a leader who from the onset will be beleaguered. There are few, if any, governmental levers for the president to pull and everything will have to be “fixed” by political plumbers hired for specific tasks. As for oversight, there is almost no one still alive who can do the job and the press is a pale shadow of what used to exist in the pre-Taylor era.

Africa’s mineral riches have been the undoing of many countries – in Liberia’s neighbour Sierra Leone, whose war lords worked together with Taylor fuelling their savagery with proceeds from alluvial diamonds, and in the Congo and Angola. Laurent Kabila, who ousted the Congo’s previous dictator, Mobutu, built up his rebel movement by mining and trafficking in alluvial gold in the hilly terrain of the province of South Kivu. Today outsiders, like the Ugandan troops operating inside the Congo, appear to have been trafficking in gold and coltan. Even in Nigeria, where the government of Olusegun Obasanjo is making a vigorous attempt to bring its burgeoning oil and gas sector under more transparent supervision, there are still reports of corruption among senior figures.

It is not only Africa that has suffered this way. Sapphires, rubies and timber banked the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. In Afghanistan, the late Ahmed Shah Massoud, the commander of the United Front, financed his militias with the sale of emeralds and lapis lazuli.

Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler of the University of Oxford have shown that resource-dependent countries are more prone to civil war. They argue against the shibboleths that the recent wars in developing countries owe themselves to inequality (Brazil has never had a civil war despite its atrocious inequalities), or that it’s ancient hatreds (the history that matters is always recent history). What appears to matter most is if the economy is poor, second that it is declining and third that it is dependent on natural resource exports.

If war could be stopped in this type of country the number of wars in the world, which in fact have been steadily declining for over 10 years, would be reduced to a literal handful. The peace recently achieved by UN peacekeepers in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Angola suggests the goal is within reach. The question for today is how to copper bottom these peaces.

Diamonds, easily transportable, have been the thugs’ best friend. Belatedly, the diamond producing and consumer nations have set up together with the private sector the so-called Kimberley Process Certification Scheme which, if by no means watertight, is working effectively to discipline the industry from cooperating with the black market. The British prime minister, Tony Blair, has given the cause a push by launching an initiative for the reporting of resource revenues by multinational companies working in extractive industries.

Yet, according to Michael Peel of the Royal Institute for International Affairs, Britain has been slow “to keep its side of the bargain on tackling corruption”. Britain’s Export Credits Guarantee Department “has shown little inclination to follow up allegations that a consortium including MW Kellogg, a client, agreed to pay $170m of bribes to secure billions of dollars of work on a giant Nigerian gas plant.”

Liberia’s free and peaceful elections are a remarkable success story, achieved by the cooperation of nations. Perhaps deploying peacekeepers is the easy part. Now, behind the scenes, nuts and bolts must be screwed into place to secure the future. Are the western countries capable of that?