The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa’s Wealth Audiobook (Free)

The trade in oil, gas, gems, metals and rare earth minerals wreaks havoc in Africa. During the years when Brazil, India, China and the other “emerging markets” have changed their economies, Africa’s reference states continued to be tethered to the bottom of the commercial supply chain. While Africa makes up about about 30 per cent from the world’s reserves of hydrocarbons and minerals and 14 per cent from the world’s population, its share of global manufacturing stood in 2011 exactly where it stood in 200 about The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Companies, Smugglers, as well as the Theft of Africa’s Prosperity 0: at 1 percent.

In his first book, The Looting Machine, Tom Burgis exposes the truth about the African development miracle: for the resource states, it’s a mirage. The oil, copper, diamonds, precious metal and coltan deposits attract a worldwide network of investors, bankers, commercial extractors and investors who match venal political cabals to loot the expresses’ value. And the vagaries of resource-dependent economies could pitch Africa’s new middle class back to destitution just like quickly because they climbed out of it. The bottom beneath their feet is really as precarious like a Congolese mine shaft; their prosperity could spill apart like crude from a busted pipeline.

This catastrophic social disintegration is not only a continuation of Africa’s past being a colonial victim. The looting now could be accelerating as never before. As global demand for Africa’s assets rises, a handful of Africans have become legitimately rich however the vast majority, just like the continent all together, has been fleeced. Outsiders tend to think about Africa as an excellent drain of philanthropy. But appear more closely in the resource sector and the relationship between Africa and all of those other world looks rather different. In 2010 2010, gasoline and mineral exports from Africa had been worthy of $333 billion, more than seven instances the value from the help that went in the opposite path. But who received the money? For every Frenchwoman who dies in childbirth, 100 die in Niger only, the previous French colony whose uranium fuels France’s nuclear reactors. In petro-states like Angola three-quarters of federal government revenue comes from oil. The government is not funded by the people, and as result it isn’t beholden to them. A rating of African countries whose economies rely on resources are rentier state governments; their folks are largely serfs. The reference curse isn’t merely some unlucky economic phenomenon, the merchandise of the intangible force. What’s taking place in Africa’s reference states is systematic looting.