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The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth, by Tom Burgis
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The trade in oil, gas, gems, metals and rare earth minerals wreaks havoc in Africa. During the years when Brazil, India, China and the other “emerging markets” have transformed their economies, Africa’s resource states remained tethered to the bottom of the industrial supply chain. While Africa accounts for about 30 per cent of the world’s reserves of hydrocarbons and minerals and 14 per cent of the world’s population, its share of global manufacturing stood in 2011 exactly where it stood in 2000: at 1 percent.
In his first book, The Looting Machine, Tom Burgis exposes the truth about the African development miracle: for the resource states, it's a mirage. The oil, copper, diamonds, gold and coltan deposits attract a global network of traders, bankers, corporate extractors and investors who combine with venal political cabals to loot the states' value. And the vagaries of resource-dependent economies could pitch Africa’s new middle class back into destitution just as quickly as they climbed out of it. The ground beneath their feet is as precarious as a Congolese mine shaft; their prosperity could spill away like crude from a busted pipeline.
This catastrophic social disintegration is not merely a continuation of Africa’s past as a colonial victim. The looting now is accelerating as never before. As global demand for Africa’s resources rises, a handful of Africans are becoming legitimately rich but the vast majority, like the continent as a whole, is being fleeced. Outsiders tend to think of Africa as a great drain of philanthropy. But look more closely at the resource industry and the relationship between Africa and the rest of the world looks rather different. In 2010, fuel and mineral exports from Africa were worth $333 billion, more than seven times the value of the aid that went in the opposite direction. But who received the money? For every Frenchwoman who dies in childbirth, 100 die in Niger alone, the former French colony whose uranium fuels France’s nuclear reactors. In petro-states like Angola three-quarters of government revenue comes from oil. The government is not funded by the people, and as result it is not beholden to them. A score of African countries whose economies depend on resources are rentier states; their people are largely serfs. The resource curse is not merely some unfortunate economic phenomenon, the product of an intangible force. What is happening in Africa’s resource states is systematic looting. Like its victims, its beneficiaries have names.
- Sales Rank: #100854 in Books
- Published on: 2016-05-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.20" h x 1.30" w x 5.50" l, 1.25 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 368 pages
Review
One of Financial Times’ Books of the Year, 2015
"...a brave and defiant book." —New York Times Sunday Book Review
"...powerful new book." —Nicholas Kristof, New York Times columnist
“[an] impressive study…It is to Mr. Burgis’s tremendous credit that he writes with such tenacity.” —Wall Street Journal
"[Burgis] presents a lively portrait of the rapacious 'looting machine'...a rich collage of examples showing the links between corrupt companies and African elites."—The Economist
“[Burgis] brings the tools of an investigative reporter and the sensibility of a foreign correspondent… [He] transcends the tired binary debate about the root causes of the continent’s misery.”—Howard French, Foreign Affairs
"Essential for understanding the colonial Africa of the past and, even more so, the diverse Africa of today." –Library Journal
"A brave, excoriating exposé of the systematic ruination of resource-rich countries of Africa, leaving "penury and strife" for its millions of inhabitants...An earnest, eye-opening, important account for Western readers." —Kirkus Reviews STARRED
"A great scrapbook of exploitation. It is written in a way that will appeal to the general reader, but still interest specialists...Burgis has the good sense not to present [the cruel contrast between individual poverty and national wealth] in an alarmist way, but with an understatement that is far more powerful...The Looting Machine is in part a means of self-exoneration, a way of making amends to those he ultimately could not help...[in this book] has done a service to some of the world’s poorest people." —Financial Times
"[An] excellent, finely reported book...The great value of The Looting Machine lies in its fresh detail, storytelling and the characters Burgis introduces. The Looting Machine is crammed with colour and lively investigative reporting." —Literary Review (UK)
"Revealing...Burgis explains lucidly how the oil and mineral bonanza subverts societies and corrupts western multinational companies trying to cash in...[He] is particularly acute in analysing how multinationals connive in this institutionalised theft…This intelligent book should give us all pause for thought when we fill our cars with petrol." —The Sunday Times (UK)
"[Burgis] makes a powerful case, through anecdote and evidence, that the dirty trade in raw materials serves individuals’ own enrichment and the demands of oligarchic and state interests worldwide." —The Times (UK)
"After nine years reporting on Africa for the Financial Times, Tom Burgis exposes how the extractive industries have turned into a hideous looting machine…[an] informative book.” —The Guardian (UK)
"Burgis shows how even the World Bank is linked to this looting [of Africa, and he] makes an important case colourfully, convincingly and at times courageously as he confronts some of those involved in the pillaging." —Observer (UK)
"Brilliant…fascinating detail… The book lives up to its colourful subtitle – “Warlords, tycoons, smugglers and the systematic theft of Africa’s wealth”. Showing the finesse and determination that has won him awards at the FT, and at considerable risk to his own well-being, Burgis tracks down and confronts the people at the centre of this plunder." —African Research Institute
"A rollercoaster read. Filled with vignettes on spooks, smugglers and kleptocratic warlords with suitcases of cash, it reads like a crime thriller, while at the same time being a well-researched, accessible account of the extractives industry; the privatisation of power in Africa and its impact on the continent’s people." —African Arguments
"This fine book...catalogues the grotesque self-enrichment of the callous rulers of Angola, Congo, Equatorial Guinea and Nigeria—countries that should be immensely wealthy, but which remain poor, even by African standards. In each case, this theft of national treasure would be impossible without non-African facilitators. ... Burgis's book is essential to understanding why poverty, ignorance and conflict persist in Africa." —Independent Catholic News
"An excellent book. Despite Africa’s impressive economic 5% growth rate, Tom Burgis ensures that we don’t stop wondering who does what in Africa and how we are all party to what Western “investors” are up to. The post-colonial corruption and rape of African resource to the benefit of western consumption is still alive and horribly well.” —Jon Snow, presenter, Channel 4 News (UK)
"Tom Burgis has managed to uncover a system responsible for the wholesale looting of Africa’s mineral resources for the benefit of oligarchic and state interests around the world. French, Chinese, Americans, Russians, Israelis, Brits, Brazilians, not to mention small but rapacious African elites, are all involved in pillaging Africa’s natural resources to line their pockets with unbelievable sums. Burgis, a gifted young journalist with the Financial Times, has tracked down all these characters across some of Africa’s most dangerous hotspots and beyond in Asia, Europe and America. The reporting is vivid, eye-popping and even at times very funny." —Misha Glenny, author of McMafia
About the Author
Tom Burgis has been tenacious and intrepid in confronting the powerful vested interests – corporate, military, financial and political – that have fed to excess off Africa’s riches. He has been reporting for the Financial Times for the last eight years, writing a series of prizewinning investigative reports from Johannesburg and Lagos. He was the winner of the FT’s second annual Jones-Mauthner Memorial Prize for his superb reporting and exposés of corruption, and the Jerwood Award for a nonfiction book in progress for The Looting Machine. He was shortlisted as a young journalist of the year for his Africa reports. This is his first book.
Most helpful customer reviews
25 of 27 people found the following review helpful.
A brilliant analysis of why corruption is widespread in many African countries
By Mal Warwick
Misconceptions abound in the public perception of corruption in Africa. Tom Burgis’ incisive new analysis of corruption on the continent, The Looting Machine, dispels these dangerous myths.
For starters, corruption is mistakenly believed to reign supreme in every country on the African continent. (There are 48 nations in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a combined population of more than 800 million.) Of course, it’s true that some African countries rank very low on Transparency International’s “Corruption Perceptions Index” (CPI) — after all, Somalia merits the very lowest score, with Sudan and South Sudan not far above it — but only Eritrea and Guinea-Bissau rank at all close to them. In between them are many other countries: Middle Eastern, Central Asian, Caribbean, South Asian. And three Sub-Saharan African nations rank in the top third of the 175 countries in the CPI: Lesotho, Namibia, and Rwanda, with Ghana close behind. Ghana scores better than Greece, Italy, and several other European nations.
Second, corruption in Africa is viewed as intractable. It’s widely believed that nothing can be done about it. Nonsense! One of the largest and most potent sources of the cash that fuels corruption is foreign aid. Institutions like the World Bank, USAID, and other national and international agencies direct most, if not all, their support to governments. This, despite the obvious evidence on the ground that a huge proportion of this aid goes straight into the pockets of the ruling elites. If foreign aid were doled out more selectively to community-based organizations, local agencies, and NGOs with grassroots operations, the picture might be very different. As things stand, only a trickle of foreign aid gets to the people who need it most: the poor.
Lastly, and most significantly, too many observers characterize African corruption as a uniquely African phenomenon that grows out of ethnic rivalries and the failure of European colonists to establish stable native governments. Those factors, while present, are only part of the story. Equally, if not more, consequential is the role of foreign investment — principally from China, the US, and Western Europe — in exploiting the continent’s abundant resources, often paying through the nose for the privilege. Corruption is a two-way street: briber and bribee need each other. And those Western investors include some of the world’s biggest US- and European-based multinational corporations — most prominently, Big Oil and the major mining companies. Chinese companies are even worse because they’re not constrained by legal restrictions at home. Prominent foreign aid cheerleaders like Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University do the African people no favors by advocating huge increases in official aid, rationalizing that some of it will actually do good. Just ask the first ten Africans you meet on the street in Lagos or Nairobi or Luanda. Unless you happen to run into a member of the privileged elite, you’ll get an earful about Western-enabled corruption.
The Looting Machine spotlights this two-way street, with an emphasis on commerce. The role of foreign aid receives little attention. The principal source of corruption in Africa, Burgis contends again and again, is its wealth of natural resources: oil, gas, gold, diamonds, copper, iron, and many other materials essential to the rich nations’ consumer economies. Citing an analysis by McKinsey, he reports that “69 percent of people in extreme poverty live in countries where oil, gas, and minerals play a dominant role in the economy and that average incomes in those countries are overwhelmingly below the global average.” This is one of the most tragic consequences of what economists refer to as the “resource curse.” Burgis asserts that “An economy based on a central pot of resource revenue is a recipe for ‘big man’ politics.”
It’s no accident that the resource curse finds its fullest expression in Africa: the continent accounts for 13 percent of the world’s population and just 2 percent of its cumulative gross domestic product, but it is the repository of 15 percent of the planet’s crude oil reserves, 40 percent of its gold, and 80 percent of its platinum — and that is probably an underestimate.”
The scope of the corruption this cornucopia of resources makes possible is difficult to comprehend. For example, “When the International Monetary Fund examined Angola’s national accounts in 2011, it found that between 2007 and 2010 $32 billion had gone missing.” That’s billion with a “B.” And this, in a country of just 21 million people — a population roughly equivalent to that of Sao Paulo, Seoul, or Mumbai.
If you want to gain perspective on poverty, war, and corruption in Africa, read this book.
The emphasis in The Looting Machine is on those countries Burgis knows well: Angola, Nigeria, Congo, with less intensive reporting from several other nations.
Tom Burgis has worked for the Financial Times in Africa since 2006, covering business, politics, corruption, and conflict. On his LinkedIn page, he describes his reporting as encompassing “Oil, mining, terrorism, the arms trade, corporate misconduct, intelligence, money-laundering, the underbelly of the global economy, forgotten warzones, tales of the human soul.” He is currently the Investigations Correspondent for the Financial Times, no longer limited to Africa.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting and Informative Good resource on corruption by Powers that Be
By N. Gorman
Clear, dense and informative. Author provides interesting first hand information of corporate
executives, government personnel and middle men/women involved in corruption of contracts
for resources between governments, companies and their cronies and the devastation they
wreak with looting the masses in African countries. Although with his journalism background
he is no sociologist or political scientist, he tries to draw parallels between countries on
the strategies and dynamics that maintain the hoarding of wealth to the detriment of the
majority who produce it.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Great expose
By Amazon Customer
Great expose on the inner working of African governments & multinational corporations. Burgis's first hand knowledge and detailed accounts makes for compelling reading. A must read.
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