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fallen from 15 per cent in 1990 to 11 per cent in 2008.¹⁴ Telecoms and financial services have boomed, but the path to industrialization is blocked off. During the very years when Brazil, India, China and the other ‘emerging markets’ were transforming their economies, Africa’s resource states remained tethered to the bottom of the industrial supply chain. Africa’s share of global manufacturing stood in 2011 exactly where it stood in 2000: at 1 per cent.¹⁵

      There are pockets of Africa where manufacturing has taken hold, notably in South Africa, where platinum is used to make catalytic converters, and in Botswana, where a nascent cutting and polishing industry is retaining some of the value-addition process for diamonds. But far more common are sights like the defunct General Motors assembly plant that used to hum outside Kinshasa or the uptown Luanda supermarket that boasts eight varieties of tinned peas, none of them home-grown despite Angola boasting enough arable land to cover Germany. The commodity boom of the past decade that has had hedge funds and investment analysts salivating over Africa’s economic prospects might even have made matters worse for those outside the resource bubble. While Nigeria was recording annual gross domestic product growth of more than 5 per cent, unemployment increased from 15 per cent in 2005 to 25 per cent in 2011.¹⁶ Youth unemployment was estimated at 60 per cent.

      A recalculation of Nigeria’s GDP in 2014, to take into account hitherto under-recorded booms in services such as telecoms and banking, made Africa’s most populous nation officially its biggest economy, surpassing South Africa. The statistical revisions did nothing to make Nigerians less poor, but it did halve the share of oil in GDP to 14 per cent. ‘The new figures show that Nigeria is much more than just an oil enclave,’ declared The Economist.¹⁷ ‘Nigeria now looks like an economy to take seriously.’

      But oil has so corrupted Nigeria that, for those trying to make an honest buck, the outlook is dispiriting. Richard Akerele, a veteran British–Nigerian businessman from an old Lagos family whose latest endeavour has been to establish a new line of passenger suites at African airports, is of an almost unassailably cheery disposition. Yet even he is losing hope.

      ‘We have everything here, everything,’ Akerele told me. ‘But our people are poor and our society is poor.’ We were sitting at a waterside bar on one of the islands of uptown Lagos. The sun danced on the waters that separate the wealthy islands from the heaving mass of humanity on the mainland, with its profusion of crammed yellow buses, its cacophony of Afrobeat and generators, its defiantly sharp-suited slum dwellers.

      For Akerele’s generation there is something deeply poignant about what Nigeria has become. He was right – Nigeria has everything: fertile land, great natural wealth, universities that in the years after independence were the envy of Africa, an abundance of intelligence and ingenuity reflected in the ease with which Nigerian expatriates make headway abroad, Nobel Prize-winning novelists, and savvy businessmen. But oil has sickened Nigeria’s heart. Akerele, who worked for a while with Tiny Rowland of Lonrho, one of Africa’s most successful and contentious mining tycoons, knows better than most what the resources industry had done to his country and his continent.

      One evening, when he and I were the last two still going at 3 A.M. after a merry evening attempting to skewer Nigeria’s ills, I asked Akerele what he foresaw for Africa. His expression, usually jovial, fell. ‘Africa will be a mine,’ he said, ‘and Africans will be the drones of the world.’

      The electronics market at Alaba proclaims itself to be Africa’s biggest. It is a sprawling bazaar located close to the clogged road – known, improbably, as the expressway – that arcs through mainland Lagos where most of the city’s 20 million inhabitants live. On sale here are the trappings of a middle-class life: refrigerators and telephones, stereos and televisions. The traders are proud that they have brought the means for a comfortable existence within reach for more of their compatriots, not just the elite who used to be the market’s sole customers before Chinese-manufactured cheaper goods arrived. But, just as in the textile markets of the North, the omnipresence of foreign-made wares testifies to Nigeria’s near-total failure to develop a strong manufacturing sector of its own.

      As I wandered through the stacks of white goods, one of the traders drew me aside. Okolie was fifty-nine. He had spent thirty years selling radios and working out how Nigeria’s petro-politics shapes the dynamics of supply and demand.

      Business was slow just then, Okolie told me. It was May 2010: Greece was on the brink of defaulting on its debts, and I presumed the reason for the slowdown at Alaba was another symptom of the global economy’s travails. I was wrong. ‘Money is down,’ Okolie explained, ‘since the president is sick.’

      Umaru Yar’Adua’s health had been weak since well before his elevation to the highest office. The state of the presidential kidneys was a favourite topic of conversation among taxi drivers and in the hotel bars where businessmen and politicians gathered. In the final weeks of 2009 Yar’Adua’s heart began to fail. He was rushed to Saudi Arabia for treatment, triggering political paralysis.

      Alaba market was struggling because the patronage system had ground to a halt. It was a perfect illustration of what Noo Saro-Wiwa, the daughter of the executed Niger Delta activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, has called Nigeria’s ‘contractocracy’.¹⁸ The beneficiaries of the government contracts that spew Nigeria’s oil rent into the patronage system, both the favoured contractors and the officials and politicians they cut in on the deals, would, under normal circumstances, spend some of their dubious earnings in places like Alaba market. But Yar’Adua’s long illness and the ensuing power struggle meant that contracts were not getting signed. The outflow of the looting machine had been temporarily blocked. But Okolie was not overly concerned. Soon the contractocracy would resume normal service. The public goods the contracts were supposed to deliver would not materialize – the subsidized fuel would be siphoned off, the potholes would go unfilled, the lights would stay off – but at least the shadow economy would be moving again. ‘If the government gives money to the contractors, money will reach us,’ Okolie said.

      Okolie had grasped a central truth about how resource states work. Demanding their rights from their British colonial rulers, the American revolutionaries declared that there would be no taxation without representation. The inverse is also true: without taxation, there is no representation. Not being funded by the people, the rulers of resource states are not beholden to them.

      Taking Africa as a whole, for every six dollars that governments bring in from direct taxation – taxes on personal income and company profits – they bring in ten dollars from taxes on the extraction and export of resources.¹⁹ In Mali gold and other minerals account for 20 per cent of government income; in Chad, an oil producer, resource revenues are more than half the total. In Nigeria the sale of crude oil and natural gas generates about 70 per cent of government revenue; in newborn South Sudan the figure is 98 per cent. Taxes, customs receipts and revenues from the sale of state assets – the things on which industrialized nations rely to fund the state and that require the acquiescence of the population – matter far less than keeping the resource money flowing. Nigeria’s GDP recalculation in 2014 showed that, once taxes from the oil industry were stripped out, the government relied on the people for just 4 per cent of its income.²⁰

      The ability of the rulers of Africa’s resource states to govern without recourse to popular consent goes to the heart of the resource curse. The resource business ruptures the social contract between rulers and ruled – the idea, shaped by political philosophers such as Rousseau and Locke, that a government draws its legitimacy from the consensual sacrifice of certain freedoms by the people in exchange for those vested with authority upholding the common interest. Instead of calling their rulers to account, the citizens of resource states are reduced to angling for a share of the loot. This creates an ideal fiscal system for supporting autocrats, from the Saudi royal family to the strongmen of the Caspian states. And data collected by Paul Collier, a professor at Oxford University who has spent his career studying the causes of African poverty, suggest a still more insidious effect. ‘The heart of the resource curse,’ Collier writes, ‘is that it makes democracy malfunction.’²¹

      Collier estimated that once natural resource rents exceed about 8 per cent of GDP, the economy of a country that stages competitive

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