This is a tale not of institutions but of the people who have bypassed them in their improbable rise to power and riches. He sees at first hand the privations, ethnic violence and state brutality suffered by the people who are governed by these predatory elites. Showing the finesse and determination that has won him awards at the FT, and at considerable risk to his own well-being, Burgis tracks down and confronts the people at the centre of this plunder. The book lives up to its colourful subtitle – “Warlords, tycoons, smugglers and the systematic theft of Africa’s wealth”. The “Looting Machine” examines the secret deals between autocracies in Angola, Guinea, the DRC and Zimbabwe and their discreet business partners from Israel to China, moving prized assets to the world’s great oil and mining companies and principal financial centres at a fraction of their true value. In fascinating detail, the book reveals how rulers of some of Africa’s most impoverished countries channel vast natural resources through “shadow states” whose purpose is to enrich and preserve a tiny self-serving elite. But is there a common thread to these iniquities? Is there a system that spans the oil banditry of Nigeria, the ravages of eastern Congo and the board rooms of South Africa’s sophisticated mining industry, enriching the few at the expense of so many?Ī brilliant new book provides some answers: “The Looting Machine” by Tom Burgis, who has covered Africa for the Financial Times since 2009. There are plenty of suspects to blame: corrupt dictators, criminal arms dealers, cynical multinationals and unscrupulous middlemen. Economists now call it “the resource curse”, the perverse effect of globalisation that inserts Africa’s minerals in our mobile phones and brings its oil to our petrol stations while inflicting misery and destruction on the people whose lands yield these riches.

At first it was explained by colonialism, then by the Cold War. Poverty in the midst of plenty: this paradox has endured in Africa from decolonisation to the era of ostensibly democratic states. His first book, The Looting Machine: Warlords, Tycoons, Smugglers and the Systematic Theft of Africa’s Wealth, uncovers the secretive networks that control Africa’s natural resources and fuel its conflicts.

He was previously the FT’s West Africa and southern Africa. Tom Burgis is the Financial Times’ investigations correspondent, covering business, politics, corruption and conflict.

The looting machine review