This study investigated the relationship between sustainable development and crude oil revenue (COR) in selected oil-producing African countries from 1992–2017 using the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) estimators on panel autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL). Sustainable development was measured with the Human Development Index (HDI). This study was significant for Africa to break away from fiscal over-dependence on natural resource revenue, especially crude oil due to its high volatility and to correct porous institutional outlook. The a priori expectation is that crude oil revenue will tank so much that many countries will record negative positions and might not be to meet fiscal demands in the long run if the situation is protracted. Empirical results revealed that there was no long-term relationship between COR and sustainable development. In other words, the results suggest that any changes to COR have a potential negative effect on sustainable development in the selected countries. This implies over-reliance on COR will impact the economies negatively in the long run. This finding, therefore, requires an immediate fiscal intervention on spending on sustainable development drivers such as education, health, agriculture cum adoption diversification policy, and veritable supply-side policies that could avert the possibility of these negative effects and to correct traits of ineffective public institution. The absence of such policy interventions in these countries seems to be related to ineffective public institution and bad governance, culminating from poor, ineffective, and inefficient implementation.