Free Ebook The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth, by Tom Burgis

Free Ebook The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth, by Tom Burgis

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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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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.

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Product details

Paperback: 368 pages

Publisher: PublicAffairs; Reprint edition (May 3, 2016)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1610397118

ISBN-13: 978-1610397117

Product Dimensions:

5.5 x 1 x 8.2 inches

Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

4.3 out of 5 stars

49 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#95,537 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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.

Clear, dense and informative. Author provides interesting first hand information of corporateexecutives, government personnel and middle men/women involved in corruption of contractsfor resources between governments, companies and their cronies and the devastation theywreak with looting the masses in African countries. Although with his journalism backgroundhe is no sociologist or political scientist, he tries to draw parallels between countries onthe strategies and dynamics that maintain the hoarding of wealth to the detriment of themajority who produce it.

This book is slightly challenging, meanders somewhat, but is endlessly fascinating. I gave it 4 stars because I felt that the abundance of information made it fascinating and kept me reading. But it could stand some improvement to its structure and organization. To me though, the bottom line is that, if you tire of supporting charities and causes that support the African peoples and nations and wonder why things don't seem to improve for African nations like they have for so many Asian nations, this will be a great starting place to acquire keen insight.

This is a very interesting but depressing read. Makes me angry at big corporations and the way the world turns.

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.

The Looting Machine is the best explaination for current income disparencys in many of the African counties he covers. He does a good job of putting everything in perspective and demonstrating how corruption has gutted the continent.

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