The looting machine: the alliance between shadow governments and the resource industry that tramples over the people who live where oil and minerals are found.
(The Looting Machine, page 158)

Burgis is a reporter for the Financial Times. In his acknowledgements, he thanks numerous other writers and editors from the FT and, indeed, The Looting Machine, despite its lurid title, has the feel of an extended Financial Times special report, one about corruption all across Africa. There are attempts at ‘colour’ i.e. descriptions of places (luxury hotels in Luanda, open cast mining in Congo) but for the most part it’s facts and figures, names and details of contracts and, volumes of oil or iron and, everywhere, amounts of money money money. Which makes sense as it’s a book-length investigation of how so many African ‘leaders’ have stolen money, scores of billions of dollars, belonging to their countries and peoples.

Many of the ideas – about the nature of Africa’s resource-based, rentier states – are familiar but what distinguishes Burgis’s book is the detailed research he has done to unearth and record the names of (some of the) companies and individuals who are responsible for looting Africa’s wealth. Other books talk about the leader of an African nation ‘and his circle’ or ‘the elite’ in general terms, whereas Burgis names names, identifying the right-hand men of dictators in Congo, Nigeria, Angola, and delves into the shady companies and crooked deals they do. By ‘crooked’ I mean deals whereby corrupt governments sell their mineral resources in such a way as to cream off huge amounts for themselves, at the expense of official government coffers, let alone the needs of their populations, while also conniving in the anti-transparency, profiteering practices of the multinational corporations they’re in bed with.

21st century Africa

What really comes over is that my thinking about Africa is out of date. It’s all very well rehashing the standard old complaints about imperialism and the scramble for Africa and the wicked colonial regimes and the arbitrary borders they imposed which split up tribes and forced completely dissimilar peoples together. Or telling off ‘the West’ and ‘western governments’ for not holding African governments to account or not supporting democracy enough or giving enough aid to help women and girls etc etc, in the style of Michela Wrong or Tim Butcher: the West must do this, that and the other, do more to blah blah…

What comes over is that all those old issues, true as they are, have been superseded by the new world, the 21st century. In the new Africa:

1. A lot of this is a lost cause; the power structures of crony capitalism, patronage politics and kleptocracy have been in place for over 60 years. It’s going to take more than a UN resolution or ‘the West’ stamping its feet to change the culture of places like Nigeria or Angola at this late stage. They are what they are. So-called elections just replace one faction of the elite with a different faction. The kleptocracy is firmly in place.
2. China and Russia. The complaints of writers like Butcher and Wrong and hundreds like them, that the West needs to be doing ‘more’, tend to ignore the reality on the ground that Russia, via the notorious Wagner group, have an ever-increasing military presence, especially in the Sahel region of Africa; and much the bigger reality that China is emerging as a decisive economic player all across the continent.

Concepts and categories

Over the past 60 years social scientists, political theorists and economists have gone over the reasons for Africa’s failure again and again. The same basic ideas recur and reappear under different headings or from different perspectives. They build up like a collage of overlapping ideas or terms. Here are some key ones which overlap and mesh together to form the conceptual foundations of Burgis’s critique:

Resource state

A state most of whose revenue comes from one or a handful of raw resources which it sells abroad, generally via multinational corporations. The completely undemocratic closed nature of these kinds of deals makes them a perfect site for kickbacks, bribes, finders’ fees, various ‘taxes’ and numerous other ways for the small elite controlling the state to cream off huge amounts into their personal bank accounts.

Resource economy

An economy heavily slanted towards the production of raw resources (oil, gas, copper, gold) which fails to diversity or invest in other sectors, for example agriculture or manufacturing. Burgis’s chapter about Nigeria is, a little surprisingly, less about the obvious corruption and wealth generated by Nigeria’s huge oil industry/resources, than a sad review of the collapse of its once-thriving textiles industry.

By half way through the book Burgis lets his anger and disgust shine through. He doesn’t refer to the president of Nigeria as the president of Nigeria but as ‘captain of Nigeria’s looting machine’ (p.201).

Shadow economy

A shadow economy includes all economic activities which are hidden from official state or international authorities for monetary, regulatory and institutional reasons. Monetary reasons include avoiding paying taxes. Institutional reasons include hiding from the general population, opposition politicians, the media, regulators, and donor governments, the extent to which you’re running a huge illegal economy.

Shadow state

A state in which the over, official forms of government are not where the real power lies. In a shadow state real power inheres in small personal networks among the elite. Shadow states are characterised by the corrupt distribution of state contracts among this elite, who may also have alliances with powerbrokers in the army or security services.

The personal state

State in which there is no distinction between the president or ruler, and state structures, especially when it comes to budget and bank accounts (p.27). Thus Mobutu of Zaire had revenue from all kinds of ‘state’ contracts, deals, taxes and so on, paid directly into his personal bank accounts and spent it as if it was his money, and so did his cronies. Money which should have been running the state, for example paying the police or maintaining the infrastructure, was instead spent building his palace in the jungle, buying swanky cars and top-end real estate in Paris and the South of France.

Kleptocracy

Where the ruler, his family and cronies, simply steal state money, usually on an epic scale.

In 2002 UN investigators appointed to study the illegal exploitation of Congo’s resources [identified] an ‘elite network’ of Congolese and Zimbabwean officials who were orchestrating the plunder of Congolese minerals under cover of war. ‘This network has transferred ownership of at least $5 billion of assets from the state mining sector to private companies under its control in the last three years with no compensation or benefit for the state or treasury of the Democratic Republic of Congo.’ (p.37)

Result: the disappearing roads, the vanished railway network, hospitals without medicines, abandoned schools and general collapse of Congo, as reported by Tim Butcher in Blood River. Burgis gives the details of a particular series of deals between the Congo state and private companies which, he claims, lost the state $1.36 billion in the 2 years between 2010 and 2012, more money than it received from humanitarian aid over the same period (p.52).

As Burgis gets more angry, he becomes more entertainingly abusive. These countries are not run by a ruling class but by a ‘looting class’ (p.203). Thus Nigerian analyst Clement Nwankwo describes the country’s largest political party, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) as ‘not a political party. It’s a platform to seize power and then share the resultant booty’ (p.203).

Cryptocracy

A form of government where the real leaders are hidden, or simply unknown. Overlaps with the universe of conspiracy theories where people believe there are hidden global or national conspiracies. In our context all it means is that sometimes the real movers and shakers, powerbrokers and big money men, work behind the scenes, anonymously.

Petrostate

A petrostate or oil state is a country whose economy is heavily dependent on the extraction and export of oil or natural gas. Merely producing oil and gas does not make a country a petrostate; Norway, Canada, and America are major oil producers but also have diversified economies. Petrostates do not have diversified economies, they rely on oil & gas exports for a large part of state revenue, which results in political and economic power becoming concentrated in the hands of an elite, and the spread of unaccountable corruption.

Take Angola where the elite are referred to as the Futungo, a few hundred closely connected families, named after Futungo da Belas, the old presidential palace (p.10). Oil accounts for 98% of Angola’s exports and about 75% of government income, and yet it provides just 1% of employment (p.13).

Or Nigeria where oil was discovered in the Niger delta in 1956 and the enormous wealth it generates for a small elite has ruined the country for 60 years. Oil accounts for 80% of Nigerian government revenue (p.63).

As a political economy took hold that was based on embezzlement and manipulating public office for private gain, government contracts for the upkeep of public goods that support industrialisation – a functioning electricity system among them – were diverted to the cronies of the rulers of the day. The patter was the same [in Nigeria] as in Angola or Congo: the more the non-oil economy withered, the greater the impulse to embezzle, perpetuating the cycle of looting. (p.76)

A petrostate is run by petropolitics which simply equate high office with theft (p.77).

A country where the ruler entrenches power in himself and his clique, using authoritarian security forces against any form of protest, is called a petro-dictatorship. The extreme brutality of the Equatorial Guinea regime is a good example. At one point Burgis coins the phrase petro-nightmare to describe Nigeria’s descent into corruptions and coups.

(Venezuela is another example of a petrostate, along with Ecuador, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Oman, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – but I can only cope with one continent at a time.)

Rentier state

A term coined by political scientists Hazem Beblawi and Giacomo Luciani, denoting countries which have undue reliance on one or several sources of rents such as mineral resources, notably oil and gas.

Rentier states derive most of their income from the extraction, processing and shipping of these resources. Government in a rentier state relies overwhelmingly on income from these industries and not on other sources of income such as general taxation. Therefore rentier states aren’t beholden to their populations but are characterised by autocratic paternalism. The media is commonly highly censored meaning that government and corporate corruption and institutional inefficiencies are easily concealed. From an economist’s point of view, this secrecy encourages inefficiencies and lack of competition, which tend to undermine the welfare, creativity, freedoms, and human development of their peoples. Reliance on one or a handful of commodities for national income means rentier states are vulnerable if commodity prices fall, if global demands falls, or when their resources are depleted.

Dutch disease

In the 1970s Holland discovered oil offshore and began drilling, extracting and refining it with great profits. Everyone was puzzled, then, when the Dutch economy as a whole fell into recession. Analysis showed that when a country comes to rely heavily on one or a handful of raw resources, it has a distorting and damaging effect on the rest of the economy, especially manufacturing and agriculture. Strong oil & gas exports drive up the value of the currency, making imports cheaper and exports more expensive (pages 69 to 70).

Thus Nigeria’s textile industry has been devastated because, when the currency rose on the back of the oil boom, it became cheaper to import cheap Chinese knock-offs of Nigerian fabrics than to make them themselves. In the mid-1980s it had 175 textile mills, now it has 25.

It is safe to say that the destruction of the Nigerian textile industry has blighted millions of lives. (p.65).

Over-investment in these industries at the expense of other sectors, such as manufacturing and agriculture, can hurt economic growth and competitiveness. Unless you make a conscious effort to support and encourage other aspects of the economy, a raw resource boom will tend to damage it. According to a 2003 World Bank report:

Between 1960 and 2000 poor countries that were rich in natural resources grew two to three times more slowly than those that were not. Over that period , of forty-five countries that failed to sustain economic growth, all but six were heavily dependent on oil or mining. (p.157)

Another bad effect is that undiversified reliance on oil and gas industries can cause political and economic crises when the price of oil drops. The entire system comes to a halt.

Resource curse

Research from the 70s, 80s and 90s all confirm the theory that countries with an abundance of natural resources (such as fossil fuels and certain minerals) tend to have less economic growth, less democracy, and worse development outcomes, than countries with fewer natural resources.

Research shows that oil wealth lowers levels of democracy and strengthens autocratic rule because political leaders in oil-rich countries refuse democratic development because they will have more to give up from losing power. Similarly, political leaders of oil-rich countries refuse democratic development because the political elite collects the revenues from the oil export and use the money for cementing its political, economic, and social power by controlling government and its bureaucracy.

No taxation, no democracy

In Western democracies governments regularly have to consult electors because we’re the ones who fund them. In a resource state or petrostate, most of the government’s income comes from licensing deals and rake-offs from refiners. The regime doesn’t get its money from the people so doesn’t care what happens to them or what they think. The rallying cry of the American revolutionaries in 1776 was ‘No taxation without representation’, well the population of a resource state doesn’t pay much tax and it gets no representation. Not relying on the people for its revenue, the government doesn’t care what they think (p.73).

Elections are the last thing the elite wants because it will disrupt the deals and contracts done with Western extractors and multinationals. The Nigerian government gets just 4% of its income from general taxation but about 70% from oil and gas revenues (p.73).

In a resource economy politics degrades down to different factions of the elite fighting for the loot, behaviour which encourages everyone at all levels of society to think and behave the same. High office becomes universally accepted as the opportunity not to serve but to steal (p.74).

Patronage politics

Patronage politics is the use of state resources to reward individuals for their electoral support. It is a type of corruption or favouritism in which a party in power rewards groups, families or ethnicities for their electoral support using illegal gifts or fraudulently awarded appointments or government contracts. There is a further consequence: patronage politics attracts crooks.

Crony capitalism

an economic system in which individuals and businesses with political connections and influence are favoured (as through tax breaks, grants, and other forms of government assistance) in ways seen as suppressing open competition in a free market. an economic system in which family members and friends of government officials and business leaders are given unfair advantages in the form of jobs, loans, etc.

A good example is the Futungo cabal of linked cronies who run Angola under the presidency of José Eduardo dos Santos, president from 1979 to 2017, whose daughter, Isabel dos Santos (born 1973), was Africa’s first woman billionaire and at one time the richest woman in Africa (p.10). The triumph of feminism? Not really. It’s deeply funny that this epitome of crony capitalism and kleptocracy was one of the BBC’s 100 women of 2015, so desperate are organisations like the BBC to fall over themselves to promote women, and especially black women (score double) even if it turns out that they’re world class crooks.

Or take Equatorial Guinea, continuing to enjoy relentless exploitation at the hands of its ruling family, relatives and cronies, led by President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the longest serving leader in the world, in power ever since 1979 when he overthrew his evil uncle, Francisco Macías Nguema. In Equatorial Guinea, oil accounts for 75% of GDP, 98% of exports and 90% of government revenue. It is a classic petrostate. Burgis enjoys telling us that the dictator’s son, Teodorin Obiang, officially receives only a modest salary for the various ministerial posts he’s held, so it must be from some other source that he has been able to buy a $30 million mansion in Malibu, properties in Cape Town and the Avenue Foch in Paris (the avenue of kleptocrats), a fleet of Ferraris and Rolls Royces, a Gulf jetstream, paintings by Renoir and Matisse, and one of Michael Jackson’s jewel-encrusted gloves – while the majority of the population live in poverty or extreme poverty, with a life expectancy of 51 (p.212).

Terrible leadership

Chinua Achebe  fingered the terrible quality of African leadership as the continent’s key problem, as long ago as 1983, 40 years ago:

The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership.’ (p.207)

Contractocracy

Government of contractors, by contractors, for contractors.

Law of the roadblock

Burgis appears to have invented this after being stopped and shaken down at countless roadblocks in numerous African countries. When the economy fails, and in particular when the police don’t get paid, they (or armed citizens) set up roadblocks and fleece drivers. Roadblocks demanding baksheesh are a telltale sign of a political system which has abandoned the wellbeing of the broader population (p.59).

China

The last 20 years have witnessed China’s ever-increasing involvement in Africa because African countries have a high concentration of vital raw resources, and China’s economy has grown at an extraordinary rate. Between the early 1990s and 2010 China’s share of world consumption of refined metals went from 5% to 45% and its oil consumption increased fivefold. In 2012 China’s economy was eight times bigger than it had been in 2002 (p.81).

In 2002 China’s trade with Africa was worth $13 billion a year; in 2012 it was worth $180 billion. Two-thirds of China’s imports from Africa were oil, the rest was other raw materials. As Burgis puts it: ‘The fates of the world’s most populous nation and the planet’s poorest continent have become wedded’ (p.86).

China spends two-thirds of its global outlay on foreign corporate acquisitions in the resources sector. Between 2009 and 2012 Chinese state-owned groups spent $23 billion buying Western companies with African resource assets that stretched from Sierra Leone to South Africa (p.143).

Many of China’s earliest deals were done with the petrostate Angola, where it developed the so-called ‘Angola model’. This is where China makes the country a big loan, generally billions of dollars, at low interest rates ostensibly for the country to develop its infrastructure (water, rods, dams, electricity, roads). These projects are then carried out by Chinese corporations employing Chinese engineers, managers and workers. And the country pays back the ‘loan’ in the form of raw materials, oil etc. Obviously, at every step of the process there is scope for the African country’s elite to cream off tens, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars for themselves. If Western countries, the UN, NGOs etc cry foul, then China and Angola (still nominally run by a Marxist-Leninist party) can dismiss their criticisms with the ad hominem catchcries of imperialism, and colonialism, and racism, and white supremacy etc while the elites of both countries get rich and the people of Angola starve in the streets. (As of 2022, about half of the population of Angola lives in ‘extreme poverty’, while the families who make up the Futungo are among the richest in the world vide Isabel dos Santos.)

Those who defend China’s involvement in Africa say China has built more infrastructure (roads, dams, airports) than the colonial powers did during the entire colonial period. Critics criticise China for doing business with dictators and opaque regimes but, you could argue, ‘the West’ a) did that for years, in fact b) put many of those dictators in place, and c) has been trying to make Africa’s nations more democratic for decades with pitiful success.

So maybe the best policy is just to crack on and build the infrastructure no matter who you deal with. Maybe building the infrastructure which will encourage African nations to develop and industrialise will also, in time, lead to the kind of empowerment and political openness which the western way has so signally failed to create.

The looting machine

As you read through the book you come to realise that Burgis’s account is very much focused on the damage mineral resources, notably gold and uranium, but above everything else, oil, have done to Africa – specifically, how scores of billions of raw materials have been extracted from Africa in a process which has somehow, almost magically, left most of its people worse off than when they gained independence in the 1960s. It’s this that he means when he refers to a looting machine. The machine consists of a number of interlocking past, including:

1. Corrupt rulers

Fairly obvious, and covered in the sections above.

2. How the World Bank and IMF screw Africa

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were set up at the end of the Second World War. The World Bank’s ostensible aim is to promote long-term economic development and poverty reduction – its official name was the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development – while the IMF was set up to ensure the stability of the global economic system.

In reality both institutions have a long and shameful history of forcing neo-liberal, ultra-capitalist solutions on developing countries, policies which have often plunged them into deeper crisis than they were already in, and actively impoverished their populations.

This is because they enforce what has long been called ‘The Washington Consensus’, the belief that, in order to thrive, all economies must follow the same strict, narrow economic and fiscal model, namely: cut taxes, cut government spending, privatise state-owned industries, scrap protectionism, open your markets to international investment and you’ll be rich. These are the strict and always unpopular terms which come attached to any World Bank loan.

Except all too often they don’t work. Put it another way: if they worked as well as the Bank and IMF claim, surely Africa would be rich by now, when it’s clearly not. In practice, Burgis claims that even if you followed Washington Consensus policies to the letter, all they do is balance the books and solve temporary budget crises: they don’t provide any guidance for the long-term development of whole economies. Compare and contrast the policies of the so-called Asian Tigers (the high-growth economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) which thrived in the 1950s and 60s. In complete contradiction to World Bank advice, these countries implemented protectionism to protect their fledgling industrial sectors, and had a high degree of state involvement, funding and planning in all aspects of their economies.

Instead, the two institutions tended to force African nations that needed their help to open their economies to the vulture forces of ‘the global market’ at exactly the time as 50 or so other struggling Third World countries were doing the same thing, all wrecking their welfare states, cutting spending to the bone and offering cut-price resource extraction deals to the world’s multinational corporations, circling like vultures.

Burgis devotes several pages to describing the Extractive Industries Review (EIR), an independent enquiry which the World Bank commissioned into its funding of the extractive industries (i.e. mining) in 2001:

The review was headed by [Indonesian economist Emil] Salim. Salim held consultations with a wide range of stakeholders in 2002 and 2003. The EIR recommendations were published in January 2004 in a final report entitled ‘Striking a Better Balance’. The report concluded that fossil fuel and mining projects do not alleviate poverty and recommended that World Bank involvement with these sectors be phased out by 2008 to be replaced by investment in renewable energy and clean energy. (Wikipedia)

In Burgis’s view, the World Bank carefully considered Salim’s recommendations, spent 9 months coming up with a lengthy reply, and then ignored them all.

It was not just the World Bank that found its influence in Africa’s resource states diminished. The IMF, its sister organisation charged with maintaining the stability of the world financial system, already had a bad reputation in Africa, with reformers and kleptocrats alike, for imposing the strictures of the Washington Consensus, under which African states had become test tubes for the unfettered free-market philosophy that would also beget the subprime crisis and subsequent near-collapse of the western banking system. Emil Salim’s review of the World Bank’s record in the oil and mining industries reported that, in the cases it had studied, ‘the IMF’s approach to the extractive sectors was mainly one that promoted aggressive privatisation of significant mining and hydrocarbon assets for short-term financing of the [government’s budget] deficit. This did nothing to ensure the creation of competition, efficiency gains, development of a domestic private sector, or environmentally and socially sound development strategies for the extractive sectors.’ (p.171)

3. How multinational corporations screw Africa

Arguably this is the core of the entire book, Burgis’s detailed investigations of the various ways multinational corporations screw African countries. I found the details sometimes hard to follow, and hard to see the difference between the legal world of business contacts and paying people finders’ fees or introductory fees (legal) and the illegal world of bribes and payoffs. But it’s much more than that:

a) Opaque deals which are never published, are inaccessible to researchers or citizens, deliberately designed to be inaccessible so as to allow bribery and kickbacks to the ruling elite.

b) The whole world of offshore accounting and tax havens whose sole reason for existing is to allow crooked governments, crooked organisations, crooked multinationals and crooked individuals to hide their financial dealings and loot from the scrutiny of tax officials and enforcement agencies.

c) Crooked governments finding themselves coerced by cartels of, for example, oil extraction companies into agreeing low rents, taxes and percentages i.e. the companies demand much lower rates of tax per barrel or tonne of precious metal, than are paid on other continents (South America or Asia). They can do this because so many African countries hover on the permanent brink of bankruptcy and so are desperate for deals and cash now, even if it means they get ripped off.

d) Cost distribution. This covers a range of tax dodges, and refers to the way transnational corporations are able to move their profits around to different countries so as to minimise their tax liabilities, or to offset profits in one country against losses or costs in another. Clever accounting means huge multinational corporations make it look like they made next to no profit and so pay little or no tax. Starbucks and Amazon have made this strategy common knowledge, but it’s one of the reasons African countries were handing over billions of dollars worth of resources to multinational corporations which made huge profits for their executives and shareholders, while the host nations remained poor and undeveloped.

The empires of colonial Europe and the Cold War superpowers have given way to a new form of domination over the continent that serves as the mine of the world – new empires controlled not by nations but by alliances of unaccountable African rulers governing through shadow states, middle-men who connect them to the global resource economy, and multinational companies from the West and the East that cloak their corruption in corporate secrecy. (p.244)

Given the comprehensive screwing so many African countries have received at the hands of Western companies and institutions, you can see why China’s ask-no-questions, get-on-and-build-it approach presents an attractive alternative.

Some numbers

In 2011 the IMF determined that the discrepancy between the amount Angola ought to have made from its huge oil sales and the amount which actually went into government accounts was $32 billion (p.173).

In 2012 Shell’s revenue was $242 billion. Shell’s chief executive, Peter Voser, was paid $16.5 million (p.194).

In 2014 reforming banker Lamido Sanusi estimated that corruption at Nigeria’s national oil company, NNPC, was robbing the national treasury of $1 billion per month (p.205) – and yet western countries give Nigeria aid, despite the fact that the amounts Nigerian politicians steal from the state purse could match western aid hundreds of times over.

Islamist violence

All this corruption keeps African states backward. It prevents the development of industry and infrastructure and trade. It creates the prevention of jobs and thus ensures that the new generations of young men have few if any prospects. It promotes grotesque inequalities between the rich elite, and the rich in towns and cities, and the poor everywhere but especially in the country. So lots of unemployed men with no future and a burning sense of grievance.

What I’ve learned to call the bayaye. (The word and concept bayaye are explored in ‘The Shadow of The Sun: My African Life’ by Ryszard Kapuściński and ‘The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia’ by James Fergusson).

Fifty years ago they were ripe to join Marxist revolutionary organisations which fought brutal insurgencies to overthrow dictators, western capitalism and install utopian communist societies. Now they join violent Islamist insurgencies which promise to overthrow dictators, western values and install utopian Islamic societies run by Sharia law. Al-Shabab. Boko Haram. Al Qaeda in the Maghreb. Islamic State. According to Sanusi:

‘There’s a clear, direct link between the uneven distribution of resources and the rise in violence.’ (p.206)

‘The region’s idle young men…were ready recruits.’ The young men problem, again, as described in Somalia.

Thought

These kinds of problems are so widespread – Transparency International report that “155 countries have made no significant progress against corruption or have declined since 2012” – that you can’t help wondering whether it is the natural state of affairs. Maybe this is what human beings, and the societies they construct, are just like.

So often the descriptions of modern African shadow states, run by a small cabal who control vast sums of money and run the country by paying off interest groups, tribes, regional leaders and so on – they sound like Dark Age warlords who emerge from wars to control territories, have first dibs on treasure, loot and women, then parcel out the loot to their lieutenants. It sound so primeval, it sounds like the kind of organisation of human groups which has occurred in one form or another throughout history, across all continents.

So maybe it’s the natural state of human societies? And maybe it’s we in the ‘Western’ democracies – we with our obsession with ‘fair’ and ‘democratic’ politics, our reliable civil services, our independent judiciaries, our complex civil societies diffusing centres of power across thousands of scattered nodes, with our ideas of being rewarded for hard work, our concepts of meritocracy – maybe it’s we who are the oddities, the exceptions, the unusual societies which need explaining?

Why give aid?

I don’t really see why we should give aid to any African country given the facts that many of them have enough natural resources to pay for their own development if only their rulers hadn’t a) stolen it or b) signed it over to rapacious extraction companies; and b) those countries which have few resources have already received tens of billions of dollars of aid which corrupt rulers have either i) stolen, ii) spent on huge amounts of arms (vide Ethiopia’s Marxist leaders building up the largest army in Africa while its population died of starvation) iii) wasted on badly conceived megaprojects which turned out to be white elephants / enormous wastes of money.

As the t-shirt slogan says, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

 The argument against violence

Burgis reports from the town of Jos in Nigeria where a terrible massacre of villagers was carried out, men, women and children hacked to pieces or burned alive. The antagonists portrayed it as part of the ongoing ‘war’ between Muslims from the north and Christians from the south. But Burgis talks to a local priest, Ignatius Kaigama, who makes a simple point I don’t remember reading before, which is: God is not such a weakling that he needs you to kill in his name (p.188). You do not need to kill anyone in the name of God or Allah or Brahma. If God wanted people killed, don’t you think he’s able to do that for himself? In other words, anyone who kills ‘in the name of God’ is admitting that their idea of God is  of a weakling who needs human help. Anyone who kills in the name of God, thinks God is weak. In other words, they are the ones who blaspheme and insult God, by implying that he needs human help.

Vagabond In Power by Nneka

Credit

The Looting Machine by Tom Burgis was first published by William Collins in 2015. References are to the 2015 paperback edition.

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