I met author Tom Burgis one evening at a café in Holborn, London. Burgis works as the investigations correspondent for “The Financial Times” and has reported from close to two dozen African countries. And his new book, “The Looting Machine”, looks at the exploitation of Africa as a result of the resource trade.
Burgis tells me how he became interested in the issue of Africa’s resource exploitation in 2008 when the financial crisis struck. He was living in South Africa then.
“There was a big collapse in the commodity prices,” he says. “They picked up again afterwards, but at the time there was a kind of panic in Zambia, Congo, and even South Africa that there was a huge price drop. And you start to see the extent to which countries’ fortunes are dependent on movements that are largely decided by economic factors far away.”
Later, while in West Africa he began to see a connection between violence and the resource trade. Burgis covered a coup in Guinea, and one in Niger. He witnessed a massacre in Jos, Nigeria, which stayed with him. In 2010 Burgis was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of this particular outbreak of violence.
It was a difficult period; Burgis had to seek treatment. “Nothing compared with the people who lived there went through,” he says. “But through a sense of guilt, I suppose I started to look more closely at the idea of this connection between the local wealth and the effect it produces. You start to see the supply chains stretching out into Europe, North America, to parts of Asia, to the rich world.”
As an example of the “connection” with Africa, which is everywhere, Burgis shows me the hinges used in the glass wall of the café we are sitting in. “Those hinges would be made of steel,” he says. “The biggest undeveloped iron-ore deposit in the world is in Guinea. The biggest ones that have been worked on at present are in Brazil and Australia. But there is a huge thing in the mountainside in Guinea. The battle to control that bit of iron ore has just been spectacular. It involves an Israeli tycoon, the two biggest iron ore mining companies in the world, it has gone on under an appalling kleptocracy, under a sort of blood-thirsty junta.”
One case study to illustrate resource exploitation is an Israeli billionaire by the name of Dan Gertler. He was born into a prominent family engaged in the diamond trade and set off at quite a young age to seek his own fortune. “He arrived in southern Central Africa and turned up in Congo in the middle of the Congolese war. The story goes that he basically got access to trading in Congolese diamonds by offering to supply a few million dollars to Laurent Kabila’s government, which was fighting an enormous war — with all sorts of other countries involved — and was desperately in need of money to keep buying arms.”
After Laurent Kabila was assassinated his son Joseph Kabila took over in 2001 and developed a close relationship with Gertler. “There are some big state copper assets that are sold to offshore companies owned by Gertler’s family for what appears to be a fraction of their price. So instead of Congolese state making that profit, Gertler makes what appears to have been a profit of more than a billion dollars by buying these assets cheaply from the state and then very quickly selling them.”
Gertler claims he has done nothing wrong and has even said that he should be awarded the Nobel prize. However, others have taken a less rosy view to his dealings. “From Kofi Annan’s Africa Progress Panel to others, there has been this outrage about how one of the world’s poorest country could have lost out on such enormous amounts of money. Two transactions involving a close personal friend of the president. It is that kind of the deal that is at the heart of the book. Because if it is a looting machine, if it is structured and systematic, you don’t have to get right into the nuts and bolts of this stuff, which is really complex.”
The role of China in Africa is an important theme which also comes up in the book. “I interviewed the Chinese ambassador in Niger, another very poor country, and he is a brilliant diplomat,” says Burgis. “He got his message across very subtly but what he was basically saying was: look around. This place was a French colony for a long time. There is very little here by way of infrastructure or opportunities for economic development outside the raw material that the French wanted for their nuclear power stations, the uranium.”
“And the Chinese ambassador in Niger basically said: look, we are here, we built a bridge, we built a hydro-electric dam, we are drilling oil,” he says. “We have made a pipeline. We have made a refinery which is an extraordinary thing to do in a landlocked country with such limited infrastructure. And he has got a really strong point I think.”
“The contrast between what China offers in terms of real, concrete things that could help to massively boost the economic development compared to the kind of the extractive model of the old European powers and the old sort of zero sum battle of the Cold War is pretty stark,” Burgis says.
But there is also a negative side to such projects. “The difficulty is that, I think, a lot of these projects are done with no tender, with no competition, with no publication of the contracts involved.”
However, Burgis tells me there is hypocrisy with the criticism of China, particularly in the West where there are frequent allegations that China ignores abuse of human rights by getting into business with authoritarian rulers and dictators.
“This criticism would carry more moral force were it not that, for example, the US has had a long and cosy relationship through Exxon and other oil companies to Equatorial Guinea and [President Theodoro] Obvian, who is a man who throws people into the Playa Negra, the black beach prison. Hideous place. Conducts completely farcical elections. His own son has become immensely wealthy while everyone else is pretty stuck in the mud.”
At the same time, Burgis notes there is also increasing cooperation between the West and China, which also share common interests. “You see big Chinese state owned companies cooperating with big Western private corporations because what both want ultimately is African resources.”
One criticism directed at those who shine a light on the underbelly of Africa is the accusation of helping to perpetuate the negative image of a continent with a lot of problems. “I’d agree there is a danger of portraying Africa as one big, 900-million strong victim,” says Burgis. “And there are booming bits of Africa. I hope I tried to get a bit of this across in the book.”
However, Burgis still feels this side of the story needs to be told. “I think the argument that there is a very large number of poor people outside Africa doesn’t change the fact that if you go to the Niger Delta or Eastern Congo, or you go to Central African Republic, parts of Chad, Niger, West Africa, life is short and [the state of] health is bad and things are tough.”
“I think you shouldn’t let the problems associated with thinking of Africa as a victim make you bite your tongue when you see that life is very hard and you can see some reasons for that.”
Burgis had not always planned on being a journalist. At university, he studied English language and literature and wanted to be a poet. He followed the news but was more interested in literature. He later went to South America, where he got a job at a small English newspaper called “The Santiago Times” which couldn’t pay him but let him live in their shed.
When he was in Chile, he travelled a lot. “There is an old mine called Potosi in Bolivia, which was the richest city in the world 500 years ago, literally paved with silver. But the Spanish imperialists mined the stocks too greedily. That region now one of the areas of deepest poverty in South America. I went to that mine, down it, when I was about 23. I started to get this sense of how massive natural wealth goes hand-in-hand with great human suffering.”
For Burgis, “The Looting Machine” is an attempt to bring to light how the pockets of great wealth in the world feed off the pockets of great natural wealth in the poor parts of the world.
“A great many people would walk in here and want to know where the coffee beans come from, right? They would walk in and they would say ‘is that from Java, is that from Colombia? Is it fair trade? Is it all the rest of it? What is the difference between wondering where the coffee beans come from and wondering where the iron ore come from? Or wondering where the fuel in the tanks of those cars comes from? Wondering where the aluminium ore that goes into cans comes from.”
It is a connection which many fail to make. “You start to get into this idea of complicity and the pillaging of Africa. It is absolutely everywhere around us. But for some reason, people so far have not made the connection as they do with coffee, as they did with boycotting Jaffa oranges from Israel back in the day, or with Bangladeshi sweatshops, with workers in poor conditions. I think it is kind of hidden or we just don’t feel the connection in the same way.”
Syed Hamad Ali is a writer based in London.
