You're right that rent seeking and corruption is a big part of the resource curse but another aspect of it is that having a large amount of natural resources ma

You're right that rent seeking and corruption is a big part of the resource curse but another aspect of it is that having a large amount of natural resources makes your other exports less competitive (because all the skilled people go work in the mining/oil/whatever industry) and so it's hard to develop the educational and other institutions that a successful society has. That's why developed countries (e.g. Norway, Canada, USA) don't suffer from the resource curse. They have other options than exports for economic growth (in addition to better functioning governments). There is an argument against aid to developing countries for similar reasons.