The Looting Machine: Warlords, Tycoons, Smugglers and the Systematic Theft of Africa’s Wealth - Tom Burgis

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resource states is systematic looting. Like its victims, its beneficiaries have names. The plunder of southern Africa began in the nineteenth century, when expeditions of frontiersmen, imperial envoys, miners, merchants and mercenaries pushed from the coast into the interior, their appetite for mineral riches whetted by the diamonds and gold around the outpost they had founded at Johannesburg. Along Africa’s Atlantic seaboard traders were already departing with slaves, gold and palm oil. By the middle of the twentieth century crude oil was flowing from Nigeria. As European colonialists departed and African states won their sovereignty, the corporate behemoths of the resource industry retained their interests. For all the technological advances that have defined the start of the new millennium – and despite the dawning realization of the damage that fossil fuels are inflicting on the planet – the basic commodities that lie in abundance in Africa remain the primary ingredients of the global economy.

      The captains of the oil and mining industries, which comprise many of the richest multinational corporations, do not like to think of themselves as part of the problem. Some consider themselves part of the solution. ‘Half the world’s GDP is underpinned by resources,’ Andrew Mackenzie, the chief executive of the world’s biggest mining company, BHP Billiton, told a dinner for five hundred luminaries of the industry at Lord’s cricket ground in London in 2013. ‘I would argue: all of it is,’ he went on. ‘That is the noble purpose of our trade: to supply the economic growth that helps lift millions, if not billions, out of poverty.’15

      To mine is not necessarily to loot; there are miners, oilmen and entire companies whose ethos and conduct run counter to the looters’. Many of the hundreds of resource executives, geologists and financiers I have met believe they are indeed serving a noble cause – and plenty of them can make a justifiable case that, without their efforts, things would be much worse. The same goes for those African politicians and civil servants striving to harness natural resources to lift their compatriots from destitution. Yet the machinery that is looting Africa is more powerful than all of them.

      That looting machine has been modernized. Where once treaties signed at gunpoint dispossessed Africa’s inhabitants of their land, gold and diamonds, today phalanxes of lawyers representing oil and mineral companies with annual revenues in the hundreds of billions of dollars impose miserly terms on African governments and employ tax dodges to bleed profit from destitute nations. In the place of the old empires are hidden networks of multinationals, middlemen and African potentates. These networks fuse state and corporate power. They are aligned to no nation and belong instead to the transnational elites that have flourished in the era of globalization. Above all, they serve their own enrichment.

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       Futungo, Inc.

      LITTLE BUT FEAR and sewage flows down the precipitous slope that separates Angola’s presidential complex from the waterside slum below. Swelled by refugees who fled a civil war that raged on and off for three decades in the interior, Chicala sprawls out from the main coast road in Luanda, the capital. Periodically the ocean sends a storm tearing through the rickety dwellings. Boatmen ply the inlets, their passengers inured to the stench emanating from the waters.

      This is not the face that Angola prefers to present to the world. Since the end of the civil war in 2002 this nation of 20 million people has notched up some of the fastest rates of economic growth recorded anywhere, at times even outstripping China. Minefields have given way to new roads and railways, part of a multibillion-dollar endeavour to rebuild a country that one of the worst proxy conflicts of the Cold War had shattered. Today Angola boasts sub-Saharan Africa’s third-biggest economy, after Nigeria and South Africa. Luanda consistently ranks at the top of surveys of the world’s most expensive cities for expatriates, ahead of Singapore, Tokyo and Zurich. In glistening five-star hotels like the one beside Chicala, an unspectacular sandwich costs $30. The monthly rent for a top-end unfurnished three-bedroom house is $15,000.1 Luxury car dealerships do a brisk trade servicing the SUVs of those whose income has risen faster than the potholes of the clogged thoroughfares can be filled. At Ilha de Luanda, the glamorous beachside strip of bars and restaurants a short boat-ride from Chicala, the elite’s offspring go ashore from their yachts to replenish their stocks of $2,000-a-bottle Dom Pérignon.

      The railways, the hotels, the growth rates and the champagne all flow from the oil that lies under Angola’s soils and seabed. So does the fear.

      In 1966 Gulf Oil, a US oil company that ranked among the so-called seven sisters that then dominated the industry, discovered prodigious reserves of crude in Cabinda, an enclave separated from the rest of Angola by a sliver of its neighbour, Congo. When civil war broke out following independence from Portugal in 1975, oil revenues sustained the Communist government of the ruling Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, or MPLA) against the Western-backed rebels of Unita. Vast new oil finds off the coast in the 1990s raised the stakes both for the warring factions and their foreign allies. Although the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, peace came to Angola only in 2002, with the death of Jonas Savimbi, Unita’s leader. By then some five hundred thousand people had died.

      The MPLA found that the oil-fired machine it had built to power its war effort could be put to other uses. ‘When the MPLA dropped its Marxist garb at the beginning of the 1990s,’ writes Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, an authority on Angola, ‘the ruling elite enthusiastically converted to crony capitalism.’2 The court of the president – a few hundred families known as the Futungo, after Futungo de Belas, the old presidential palace – embarked on ‘the privatization of power’.

      Melding political and economic power like many a postcolonial elite, generals, MPLA bigwigs and the family of José Eduardo dos Santos, the party’s Soviet-trained leader who assumed the presidency in 1979, took personal ownership of Angola’s riches. Isabel dos Santos, the president’s daughter, amassed interests from banking to television in Angola and Portugal. In January 2013 Forbes magazine named her Africa’s first female billionaire.

      The task of turning Angola’s oil industry from a war chest into a machine for enriching Angola’s elite in peacetime fell to a stout, full-faced man with a winning grin and a neat moustache called Manuel Vicente. Blessed with what one associate calls ‘a head like a computer for numbers’, as a young man he had tutored schoolchildren to supplement his meagre income and support his family. After a stint as an apprentice fitter, he studied electrical engineering. Though he had been raised by a lowly Luanda shoemaker and his washerwoman wife, Vicente ended up in the fold of dos Santos’s sister, thereby securing a family tie to the president. While other MPLA cadres studied in Baku or Moscow and returned to Angola to fight the bush war against Unita, Vicente honed his English and his knowledge of the oil industry at Imperial College in London. Back home he began his rise through the oil hierarchy. In 1999, as the war entered its endgame, dos Santos appointed him to run Sonangol, the Angolan state oil company that serves, in the words of Paula Cristina Roque, an Angola expert, as the ‘chief economic motor’ of a ‘shadow government controlled and manipulated by the presidency’.3

      Vicente built Sonangol into a formidable operation. He drove hard bargains with the oil majors that have spent tens of billions of dollars developing Angola’s offshore oilfields, among them BP of the UK and Chevron and ExxonMobil of the United States. Despite the tough negotiations, Angola dazzled the majors and their executives respected Vicente. ‘Angola is for us a land of success,’ said Jacques Marraud des Grottes, head of African exploration and production for Total of France, which pumped more of the country’s crude than anyone else.4

      On Vicente’s watch oil production almost tripled, approaching 2 million barrels a day – more than one in every fifty barrels pumped worldwide. Angola vied with Nigeria for the crown of Africa’s top oil exporter and became China’s second-biggest supplier, after Saudi Arabia, while also shipping significant quantities to Europe and the United States. Sonangol awarded itself stakes in oil ventures operated by foreign companies and used the revenues to push its

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