The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth Kindle Edition

Tom Burgis thoroughly describes how the Dutch disease or resource curse has undermined many Africa’s “resource-rich” countries that often are disproportionately dependent on the extraction and export of oil, gas, and minerals for their revenue mix. Mr. Burgis adds that both corruption and ethnic violence can compound the misery that the Dutch disease generates in these “resource-rich” countries.In a nutshell, the resource curse sets in a cycle of economic addiction through an upward revaluation of the currency in “resource-rich” countries. The decay of the local manufacturing and agriculture sectors that results from their non-competitiveness in the global economy increases the dependency of the “addicted” countries on natural resources. The well-connected local elite monopolizes the “economic rent” that the resources business generates, creating an apartheid between them and the rest of the population. This looting machine cannot work properly without the well-understood complicity of foreign governments and companies eager to put their hands on this bounty, preferably on the cheap. China has not many lessons of morality to receive from the West that too often shines through both its hypocrisy and cynicism. Furthermore, while the resources business is capital-intensive, it is not labor-intensive. Finally, any infrastructure that pre-existed the extraction and export of these raw materials gets neglected in the process.To his credit, Mr. Burgis is not all gloom and doom about the future of Africa. The author highlights that for all their shortcomings, South Africa and Botswana have developed a viable manufacturing sector within their borders. These exceptions prove the rule that the Dutch disease blocks the path to industrialization across Africa, resulting in the specialization of many Africa’s “resource-rich” countries in remaining poor.

Many people wonder why African countries have stayed poor, after the rest of the world has become more economically viable. The answer is that Western and now Chinese companies are looting Africa of their natural resources. The looting takes place with African allies in the countries. Nigerian and Angolan authorities help the West and the Chinese with their oil needs for huge kickbacks that disappear into far away banks, while the average Nigerian and Angolan subsist on less and less money. To make matters worse, the Chinese steal the clothing market away from Nigerians with their clothing smuggled into Nigeria, destroying a market where the local population made a living. In Ghana, an American company pays a fraction of the profits to the local government after mining gold. The company poisons the environment and the local population gets no benefits except poisoned fish. In the DRC, the Kabila dynasty replaced Mobutu, and now mines lots of materials (bauxite, tantalum) but the local population gets guns to settle ethnic rivalries. The ethnic rivalries are just gangs wanting a piece of the action so that they can make their money. Western and Chinese companies loot the continent and the West wonders why Africans are so poor. Africans get a tiny portion of aid that these multinationals rip off from the Africans. Burgis tells the story of why things must change in Africa.This is a great book about the inequalities in Western and Chinese business in Africa. If you need to understand the continent, this is a nice book to start with.

The author deserves 5 stars for this expose, but unfortunately his skills as a writer are not up to it.The information about the looting of Africa reads like a prosecutor’s brief. The information is invaluable to our Security Services, our Security and Exchange Commission, the FBI and all other law enforcement agencies in the world, but for a general well read reader this book is a chore.Having said the above, it is a chore which every citizen in the world must do!A comparable expose book that was reader friendly was Chrystia Freeland’s, “Plutocrats”.One of the theses of Tom Burgis’s is the concept of the system of looting. This is universal. All the people involved in the looting are your next door neighbors. As Hannah Arendt, years ago wrote about Otto Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, where she described in her book “the banality of evil”!This is profound, for example not only in Africa but in Russia, China and many other countries of the world.I grew up in the inner city of New York and my African American friends said that it was the “MAN” that directed the discrimination against them, when I asked them who the MAN was, they could not name him. It was the typical conspiracy theory.The problem was not the MAN, but the culture of America, the system of American inter-racial relations was and is given to us with our mother’s milk.

A documentary of the links in the web of complicity of actors hiding behind the state and corporate structures that have been sucking Africa dry for centuries. This book illustrates how the tentacles of globalization, which we all benefit from, are long and strong and evolving, reaching out and into the depths of all continents; squeezing the lifeblood out of poor resource communities. Enlightening and inspiring read!

Very pleased

Very very very good book. Highly recommended!

Interesting and worth a read!

Systematic looting, ethnic conflicts, corruption and patronage is the curse of the sub-Saharan continent.This excellent book tells the stories of how natural resource-rich sub-Saharan countries are being systematically looted by their kleptocrats, ruling classes, and beyond all foreign companies and some unscrupulous individuals. This book is the result of investigative journalism at its finest, and the product of a scrupulous analysis. I highly commend the author for being so courageous and having produced such a revealing book. A must-read book for anyone who wants to understand why, since the colonization by Western powers, the sub-Saharan continent has been watching the rest of the world marching on the path of progress and prosperity while it remains stuck conflicts and problems of all sorts.I highly recommend this must-read book, along with the other excellent book titled China's Second Continent by Howard W. french.After having read this book, one can only come to the conclusion that black Africa, with its states artificially created by Britain, France and Portugal, and rotten with ethnic conflicts and corruption, will continue to be poor for the foreseeable future despite its enormous reserve of valuable natural resources. The culture of patronage and corruption that characterizes these societies will ensure that the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of foreigners and the ruling classes will continue unabated. After you have read this book, you will feel a deep sense of hopelessness and immense pity for the populations of these states who are so miserable and powerless in the face of the systematic looting perpetrated by their own ruling classes, and in particular so unashamedly by Western and now Chinese corporations. To ad insult to injury, some of the looting is done with the help of the IMF, the World Bank and its IFC division. One has to wonder how a continent, let alone a state, can fight against such formidable forces? How can a country develop economically, let alone technologically, if its ruling class is solely preoccupied with its own enrichment and self preservation, in the absence of true democracy or any real and effective opposition.After a century of Western colonization that had done nothing for the development of these states, maybe the only hope left is that the recent massive Chinese immigration and influx of Chinese aid and investments will bring deep and permanent structural ethnic and cultural changes to these societies, and finally help to lift this content out of misery; like what successive waves of Chinese immigration have done for most Southeast Asian countries over the previous centuries, which has recently enabled a number of them to become economic tigers in their own rights. The effect will be a gradual phase out of foreign influence (Western, Israeli, Lebanese and Indian), to be replaced by Chinese capital and human resources. Thanks to the accelerated pace of change that we are experiencing nowadays, I predict that this mutation will materialize after only two or three generations of inter-racial marriages between the Chinese immigrants and the local populations, instead of a couple of centuries as it has taken before for Southeast Asia.Or, maybe the sub-Saharan continent will end up being the Mine of the World, when China and most of Asia will remain the Factory of the World, while the West consolidates its role of the Financier and Consumer of the World. We saw the Division of Labor in action in the 19th and 20th centuries, now in the Global Village of 21st century the division of labor is split between continents in a tightly-coupled Supply Chain

It appears a lot of research went into the writing of this book and it gives us insight into why many Africans are mired in poverty while the continent has enormous mineral wealth.