By Ed Stoddard
JOHANNESBURG, Feb 2 (Reuters) - Fancy a bet on the best-performing currency of 2012?
If last year is anything to go by it may lie somewhere in frontier Africa, scene of a headlong resource scramble by mining companies that threatens to overwhelm small, undeveloped economies with a tsunami of cash.
The Tanzanian shilling <TZS=> could be an outside shot - the east African country is an up-and-coming gold producer and promising source of natural gas.
But a stronger contender could well be the leone <SLL=> of Sierre Leone, home to some of the world's richest but least-exploited iron ore deposits due to a 1991-2002 civil war that claimed 50,000 lives and brought the industry to a standstill.
That ended last year with the first ore shipment in more than two decades, and now the International Monetary Fund is talking about economic growth of 50 percent in 2012.
Such eye-popping statistics are sure to be the talk of Cape Town next week, when investors and mining officials from across Africa rub shoulders at the biggest annual industry jamboree on the continent.
But they are also a reminder of the wrenching forces that big mining investment can unleash in countries in Africa, where nearly all governments already have a poor track record of translating resource wealth into broad prosperity.
Take war-scarred Mozambique.
Last year, its currency, the metical <MZN=>, was the world's best performer, rising more than 20 percent against the dollar as greenbacks flowed in to develop untapped coal deposits thought to be among the most promising in the world.
Finance Minister Manuel Chang said in November he was happy with the metical's strength, but textile factory bosses and the managers of the hotels popping up along Mozambique's palm-fringed Indian Ocean beaches are unlikely to agree.
INVESTMENT FLOOD
By some estimates the former Portuguese colony is sitting on 23 billion tonnes of coal, two-thirds of neighbouring South Africa's vast reserves.
Brazilian mining giant Vale <VALE5.SA> said in November it had approved a $6 billion expansion of its Moatize coal project in the northwest - equal to 50 percent of Mozambique's gross domestic product.
In South Africa, the continent's largest economy, the equivalent would be $210 billion, a sum that would swamp even its highly developed and liquid capital markets, and hurl the rand <ZAR=> exchange rate into the stratosphere.
Besides a soaring currency, Mozambique is also showing other signs of the "resource curse" that has afflicted Nigeria and Angola, Africa's top two oil producers, where a tiny elite has grown fat on petrodollars yet millions remain mired in poverty.
Figures provided to Reuters by Washington-based anti-corruption group Global Financial Integrity (GFI) suggest $555 million - about 5 percent of GDP - flowed illicitly out of Mozambique in 2010 through "trade mispricing". That is about seven times the $85 million GFI estimates leaked out in 2009 through dubious channels.
Trade mispricing typically involves importers pretending to pay foreigners more for imports than they actually spend. The difference provides cash that can be discreetly put into banks or other assets abroad.
Extractive industries have been especially susceptible to this kind of corruption, raising pressure on them to improve transparency, and the explosion in mining investment and the import of big-ticket items is likely to be a main reason for the increase in Mozambique's missing funds.
GFI has estimated that in 2009 $27.5 billion flowed illicitly out of Nigeria, while in the same year almost $6 billion was spirited out of Angola - nearly a sixth of the country's entire annual budget.
(Editing by Ed Cropley and Catherine Evans)
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