SAO TOME-LISBON, July 18: As life returned to normal in Sao Tome and Principe after a military coup, western embassies in the capital were abuzz with one question: how would the new rulers handle the country’s potentially huge oil wealth?

“We believe the coup has links with oil, but we just do not know how,” one diplomat said.

The millions of oil barrels which are believed to lie beneath Sao Tome’s territorial waters represent a dazzling hope for one of the world’s poorest countries, whose 40,000 residents scrape a living from cocoa, fish, aid and tourism.

Yet the coup did not dispel fears that the oil revenues would be pocketed by the ruling class, failing to benefit the majority of the population.

“It is because of oil that they wanted to take over power,” toppled president Fradique de Menezes charged, describing the insurgents as “small groups of oil-smelling people”.

De Menezes and his cronies have paved the way for wealth-grabbing, organizing Sao Tome’s oil exploration in a way which makes it easy, Portuguese analysts said.

With some 60 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the Gulf of Guinea has emerged as one of the world’s main oil producers, though it still lags far behind Saudi Arabia’s 250 billion barrels of reserves.

Sao Tome has not yet pumped any oil, but it is believed to sit on an estimated four billion barrels of crude.

The US imported 8.5 per cent of its total crude imports from the Gulf of Guinea in April, and is expected to substantially increase that share.

West Africa already has established oil producers such as Nigeria, Angola and Gabon, which are being joined by upstarts such as Equatorial Guinea and Chad.

The United States hopes that West Africa could partly replace the unstable Middle East as an oil supplier.

Sao Tome and Nigeria have formed a joint development zone to exploit the oil resources in waters between them.—dpa