The Looting Machine: Warlords, Tycoons, Smugglers and the Systematic Theft of Africa’s Wealth
Overseas Press Club Award Winner 2016A shocking investigative journey into the way the resource trade wreaks havoc on Africa, ‘The Looting Machine’ explores the dark underbelly of the global economy.Africa: the world’s poorest continent and, arguably, its richest. While accounting for just 2 percent of global GDP, it is home to 15 per cent of the planet’s crude oil, 40 per cent of its gold and 80 per cent of its platinum. A third of the earth’s mineral deposits lie beneath its soil. But far from being a salvation, this buried treasure has been a curse.‘The Looting Machine’ takes you on a gripping and shocking journey through anonymous boardrooms and glittering headquarters to expose a new form of financialized colonialism. Africa’s booming growth is driven by the voracious hunger for natural resources from rapidly emerging economics such as China. But in the shadows a network of traders, bankers and corporate raiders has sprung up to grease the palms of venal local political elites. What is happening in Africa’s resource states is systematic looting. In country after country across the continent, the resource industry is tearing at the very fabric of society. But, like its victims, the beneficiaries of this looting machine have names.For six years Tom Burgis has been on a mission to expose corruption and give voice to the millions of Africans who suffer the consequences of living under this curse. Combining deep reporting with an action-packed narrative, he travels to the heart of Africa’s resource states, meeting a warlord in Nigeria’s oil-soaked Niger Delta and crossing a warzone to reach a remote mineral mine in eastern Congo. The result is a blistering investigation that throws a completely fresh light on the workings of the global economy and will make you think twice about what goes into the mobile phone in your pocket and the tank of your car.
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2015
Copyright © Tom Burgis 2015
Tom Burgis asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Map © John Gilkes
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Source ISBN: 9780007523108
Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780007523115
Version: 2016-02-29
IN LATE 2010 I started to feel sick. At first I put the constant nausea down to a bout of malaria and a stomach bug I’d picked up during a trip a few months earlier to cover an election in Guinea, but the sickness persisted. I went back to the UK for what was meant to be a week’s break before wrapping up in Lagos, the Nigerian megacity where I was based as the Financial Times’s west Africa correspondent. A doctor put a camera down my throat and found nothing. I stopped sleeping. I jumped at noises and found myself bursting into tears. At the end of the week I was walking to a shop to buy a newspaper for the train ride to the airport when my legs gave way. I postponed my flight and went to another doctor, who sent me to a psychiatrist. In the psychiatrist’s office I started to explain that I was exhausted and bewildered, and I was soon sobbing uncontrollably. The psychiatrist told me I had severe depression and that I should be admitted to a psychiatric ward immediately. There I was put on diazepam, a drug for anxiety, and antidepressants. After a few days in the hospital it became apparent that there was something else tormenting me in tandem with depression.
Eighteen months earlier I had travelled from Lagos to Jos, a city on the fault line between Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north and largely Christian south, to cover an outbreak of communal violence. I arrived in a village on the outskirts not long after a mob had set fire to houses and their occupants, among them children and a baby. I took photographs, counted bodies, and filed my story. After a few days trying to understand the causes of the slaughter, I set off for the next assignment. Over the months that followed, when images of the corpses flashed before my mind’s eye, I would instinctively force them out, unable to look at them.
The ghosts of Jos appeared at the end of my hospital bed. The women who had been stuffed down a well. The old man with the broken neck. The baby – always the baby. Once the ghosts had arrived, they stayed. The psychiatrist and a therapist who had worked with the army – both of them wise and kind – set about treating what was diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A friend of mine, who has seen his share of horrors, devised a metaphor through which to better understand PTSD. He compares the brain to one of those portable golf holes with which golfers practise their putting. Normally the balls drop smoothly into the hole, one experience after another processed and consigned to memory. But then something traumatic happens – a car crash, an assault, an atrocity – and that ball does not drop into the hole. It rattles around the brain, causing damage. Anxiety builds until it is all-consuming. Vivid and visceral, the memory blazes into view, sometimes unbidden, sometimes triggered by an association – in my case, a violent film or anything that had been burned.
Steadfast family and friends kept me afloat. Mercifully, there were moments of bleak humour during my six weeks on the ward. When the BBC presenter welcoming viewers to coverage of the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton declared, ‘You will remember where you were on this day for the rest of your life,’ the audience of addicts and depressives in the patients’ lounge broke into a chorus of sardonic laughter and colourful insults aimed at the screen.
The treatment for PTSD is as simple as it is brutal. Like an arachnophobe who is shown a drawing of a spider, then a video of one, then gradually exposed to the real thing until he is capable of fondling a tarantula, I tried to face the memories from Jos. Armed only with some comforting aromas – chamomile and an old, sand-spattered tube of sunscreen, both evocative of happy childhood days – I wrote down my recollections of what I had seen, weeping onto the paper as my therapist gently urged me on. Then, day after day, I read what I had written aloud, again and again and again and again.
