So, with oil prices continuing to nosedive, it seems it will be at least two or more years before all those newly discovered oil deposits in Uganda and Kenya that were make big headlines in recent years are commercially exploited.

One of the most shocking things to emerge from this oil price collapse is just how scandalously the market is rigged.

We are told that for most producers, anything below $80 a barrel is not profitable. Compare that with mobile phone makers.

Fifteen years ago, if you didn’t have at least $300 you couldn’t buy a mobile phone. Today you can buy a basic phone, a Chinese rip off, for $30 – and it will have more features a longer battery life than the one for which you were forking out $300 in 1999.

There are two reasons for that. First, there is no cartel of mobile phone makers conspiring to keep prices high by manipulating supply like the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) does with oil.

Second, the ruthless competition in the industry has driven innovation that enabled mobile phone makers to give us better phones cheaply.

By contrast, fossil fuels have really remained the same. We have unleaded petrol yes, but there is also the regular one that pretty much the same as you would have got from a pump 100 years ago.

Now that the dream of a rich East Africa fuelled by oil is in tatters, what can we learn from it?

Look at Russia. Russia had shaken off its post-communist lethargy and become a muscular country growling at its rivals, because of its oil and gas. When that often-irritating American Senator John McCain said Russia was one giant gas station pretending to be a real country, he sounded arrogant and even, stupid.

But the truth is that if oil prices were to hit $65 a barrel and stay there for two years, Russia would be a shell at the end of it.

Finland is a country that had worked hard, and in Nokia had a phone company that became a world behemoth. But most importantly, it had a rich paper industry.

Recently, its finance minister said his country had been ruined by just one company – Apple. Apple’s iPhone buried Nokia (that shouldn’t have happened, they took their eyes off the ball). And the iPad killed the paper industry (that was inevitable).

Look around. In many parts of Uganda, mangoes were really not sold in markets and at the roadside until about 20 years ago. They grew wild, and children feasted on them freely.

Today children from poor families grow up without tasting mangoes. The wild ones are long gone.

Fossil oil has partly been hammered by shale oil – which the Americans actually extract from rocks. However shale oil is more a product of technological innovation, than rocks.

The money is no longer in owning the well, but making and owning a new type of drill.

For East Africa then, the lesson is that we should invest in raising a population that makes drills and the tools of the future, not one that drills. In short, quality education.

We should never trust our long-term future to things that we dig from the ground, or pick off trees.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa (mgafrica.com) Twitter: @cobbo3