The recent discoveries of oil (and gas) resources and the surge in exploration in potential petroliferous basins of East Africa will revive academic and policy debates discussing causal linkages between resource wealth and socio-econopolitical development. It has certainly generated new discourses amongst the academia and the literati who specialize in oil sector governance research. More importantly, these developments have set the stage for intensive analysis of new interrelationships among interests, institutions, and identities within the oil corporate, policy, and citizen constituency. This project seeks to investigate and elucidate on the structure of policy context for the region within resource curse narratives and its consequence for sector governance in the region. To provide a holistic analysis, it navigates through the prominent tenets of the rentier state thesis. This serves a heuristic purpose and acts as the locus of analytical and empirical evidence