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NY Times SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW, MARCH 22, 2015
‘The Looting Machine,’ by Tom Burgis
By MICHELA WRONG
THE LOOTING MACHINE
Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa’s
Wealth
By Tom Burgis
321 pp. PublicAffairs. $27.99.
Back in the Mobutu era, I worked as a stringer in Kinshasa, the capital
of what was then Zaire. “So, what do they want?” my driver Pierre would
ask whenever I exited a Western embassy after a chat with a diplomat.
“What’s the plan?” His question captured the sense of powerlessness that
pervaded the country, a product of Big Man rule, Cold War interference
and brutal colonial experience. If there was something of which Pierre
felt certain, it was that he was not master of his fate.
Times have changed, but the suspicion African citizens nurse that they
are unwitting pawns in someone else’s high-stakes chess game is as
justified today as it was then, if Tom Burgis is to be believed. Only
now, the shadowy players are not to be found in state rooms in
Washington, Moscow, Paris or London. What he describes instead in “The
Looting Machine” is a network of anonymous multinationals, corporate
investors and bankers who strike opaque deals with coup leaders and
precarious African elites that allow them to drain the continent’s
natural resources in exchange for precious little — if you’re an
ordinary African. Enormous bribes, tax exemptions and the cynical
manipulation of the practice known as “transfer pricing,” in which
multinationals shift earnings to jurisdictions where they pay less tax,
suck the revenues away. “These networks fuse state and corporate power,”
Burgis writes. “They are aligned to no nation and belong instead to the
transnational elites that have flourished in the era of globalization.
Above all, they serve their own enrichment.”
This is a brave, defiant book, for the bleakness of Burgis’s vision jars
with the tenor of the times. “Africa Rising” has become the obligatory
catch phrase applied to the continent in recent years, a label inspired
by the growth of an aspirational African middle class, the invigorating
impact of mobile-phone and Internet technology, and growth rates in
gross domestic product that European countries can only envy. It is
fashionable, these days, to be upbeat about Africa.
Burgis is having none of it. Impressive growth rates, as he points out,
often mask staggering inequality. Africa’s astonishing mineral abundance
has, counterintuitively, doomed it to economic underdevelopment: The
continent’s share of global manufacturing in 2011 was a paltry
1 percent, unchanged since 2000. “The Looting Machine” explores the
contours of the infamous “resource curse,” which dictates that the
countries appearing to have everything going for them — Angola and
Nigeria with their oil, the Democratic Republic of Congo with its coltan
and diamonds, Guinea with its bauxite, Niger with its uranium — remain
the poorest and worst governed, their local industries wiped out by
imports and democratic accountability undermined by the flood of dollars
into the coffers of a ruling elite.
The sinister drama described in the book has its antiheroes, the robber
barons of our day. One of them is the Israeli Dan Gertler, who
befriended Laurent Kabila’s son Joseph in the 1990s. In return for a $20
million war chest contribution, Gertler was awarded a monopoly to buy
every diamond dug from the ground in Congo. If the transactions Gertler
masterminded have made him a billionaire, Burgis notes that between 2007
and 2012 “just 2.5 percent of the $41 billion that the mining industry
generated in Congo flowed into the country’s meager budget.”
Even more intriguing is Sam Pa, a Chinese businessman with “many names
and many pasts.” Founder of the shadowy Hong Kong-registered Queensway
Group syndicate, Pa has exploited his connections with China’s Communist
Party and military to broker complex deals in Angola, the Republic of
Congo, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe. So often hailed as Africa’s
salvation, China emerges particularly badly from Burgis’s account. While
maintaining a fiction of distance between itself and the Queensway
Group, he writes, Beijing is busily winning contracts on the syndicate’s
coattails that help keep fragile, venal regimes firmly in place.
Burgis, who crisscrossed Africa to gather his material, has a brisk,
muscular writing style, but he overestimates the average reader’s
appetite for the nitty-gritty of shareholdings and corporate filings,
detail that may grip in the heat of an unfolding newspaper investigation
but makes eyelids droop when recalled at leisure. The book is at its
best when the writer puts percentages and statistics aside and hits the
road, interviewing the fishermen, artisanal miners and slum dwellers
dispossessed and bankrupted by the deals described.
Frustratingly, Burgis never addresses the question of what can be done
to halt — or at least brake — the systematic looting. Perhaps that is an
issue he intends to probe in another book, but omitting any hint of a
solution feeds into an image of a powerless, victimized continent my
Congolese driver would immediately have recognized. It also leaves
Burgis vulnerable to a criticism sometimes voiced by African
intellectuals, who accuse Westerners denouncing corporate misbehavior on
their continent of wanting to keep it locked in a state of preindustrial
innocence that chimes with their romantic preconceptions of “the Dark
Continent.”
Since Burgis is a reporter for The Financial Times, I rather doubt he
harbors such anticapitalist instincts. As he points out, “to mine is not
necessarily to loot.” Capitalism isn’t obliged to take the ugly form
captured in these pages, and what campaigners want is not disinvestment
but responsible engagement. Africa’s future will surely be built on its
extractive industry, but the oil, timber and mining deals of the future
must be open to scrutiny, produce decent levels of tax, and put national
interest before a tiny elite’s greed. That outcome depends on domestic
political will. The looting machine relies for its existence on the
complicity of African presidents, ministers and members of parliament —
once that cozy complicity ends, the lubricating oil will dribble away,
and the machine will seize up.
Michela Wrong is the author of three nonfiction books on Africa. Her
first novel, “Borderlines,” set in the Horn of Africa, will be published
in Britain in August.
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