About this item
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 transformed their economies, Africa's resource states remained tethered to the bottom of the industrial supply chain. While Africa accounts for about 30 per cent of the world's reserves of hydrocarbons and minerals and 14 per cent of the world's population, its share of global manufacturing stood in 2011 exactly where it stood in 2000: 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, gold and coltan deposits attract a global network of traders, bankers, corporate extractors and investors who combine with venal political cabals to loot the states' value.
About the Author
I've been reporting from Africa since 2006, mostly as a correspondent for the Financial Times based first in Johannesburg then in Lagos. I've covered coups from Madagascar to Guinea and oil- and mineral-fuelled wars from eastern Congo to the Niger Delta. I've descended the world's deepest mine in South Africa, slunk through Zimbabwe's brutalised diamond fields and developed an addiction to Afrobeat. I'm currently the FT's investigations correspondent, based in London. My investigative reporting has won several awards, including a Society of Publishers in Asia award, and was shortlisted for a European Press Prize and a British Press Award.
The Looting Machine tells the story of how Africa's great natural wealth has become its curse, of what life is like for those who live under that curse, and of how shadow states across the continent have, in cahoots with multinational corporations and tycoons from east and west, harnessed Africa's treasure to their own oppressive interests. The book won an Overseas Press Club of America award and was named a book of the year by the Financial Times and the Spectator.
