In a speech that I delivered in July 2016, I spoke about the power of big business and the human rights protection vacuum in Africa. As I briefly expounded in that speech, the human rights protection vacuum is a product of a confluence of factors. These are the enormous scale of the economic, socio-cultural and political power that big business has come to amass in the age of globalization, the lack of legal obligation and direct responsibility of corporations for human rights and the poor bargaining power of African states and the pervasive institutional and regulatory weakness prevalent on the continent.

As highlighted in the speech, in Africa nowhere is the impact of the human rights protection vacuum is more pronounced than in the extractive industries sector. At the time, one of the books I drew on to portray the danger the power of big business poses on the African continent was Ngugi wa Thiogo’s novel the Wizard of the Crow, particularly what he termed in the novel corpolonialism.

A year before the speech in which I articulated the concept of the human rights protection vacuum a book of magnificent depth on the so-called resource curse was published. The book is, The Looting Machine: Warlords, Tycoons, Smugglers and Systemic Theft of Africa’s Wealth by Tom Burgis. Published in 2015 in the United Kingdom by William Collins, the Looting Machine is unparalleled, to my knowledge, in its in-depth analysis of the power structure that lies behind not only what Burgis calls ‘systemic theft of Africa’s wealth’ or in Thogo’s formulation corpolialism. But I also found it awesomely insightful in its analysis of the factors that created the human rights protection vacuum, that has been a focus of my preoccupation since I have been tasked with the responsibility of leading the work of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) on Extractive Industries, Environment and Human Rights Violations in Africa.

The Looting Machine starts with a dive into an interrogation of what may be termed the trouble with Africa (to paraphrase from Chinua Achebe’s famous essay The Trouble with Nigeria) in general and the phenomenon of the resource curse in particular. Burgis observes there ‘are plenty of theories as to the cause of the continent’s penury and strife’. ‘Colonizers had ruined Africa, some of the theorists contended, its suffering compounded by the diktats of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund; others considered Africans incapable of governing themselves, excessively ‘tribal’ and innately given to corruption and violence. There were those who thought Africa was largely doing just fine but that journalists seeking sensational stories and charities looking to tag at donors’ heartstrings distorted its image.’ While eschewing the simplistic analysis that blames the troubles of Africa on conflicts from ‘ancient hatred’, the Looting Machine seeks to excavate the multiple and intricately interwoven forces and factors accounting for it.

In a way that captures the confused state of contemporary economic policy making in Africa including the forces shaping it, Burgis notes ‘prescriptions were as various and contradictory as the diagnoses: slash government spending to allow private businesses to flourish; concentrate on reforming the military, promoting ‘good governance’ or empowering women; bombard the continent with aid; or force open African markets to drag the continent into the global economy.’

The Looting Machine notes that rather than being ‘some unfortunate economic phenomenon, the product of an intangible force’, the resource curse is a direct result of ‘systematic looting’. Burgis traces the origins of the resource curse to the colonial past with the plunder of Southern Africa, in the nineteenth century, the trading of slaves, gold and palm oil along Africa’s Atlantic sea-board and the flow of crude oil in Nigeria by the middle of the twentieth century. A major factor that has condemned resource rich African countries to the curse of riches, according to the Looting Machine, is the retention by ‘corporate behemoths of the resource industry’ of ‘their interests’ upon the departure of ‘European colonialists’ and the achievement by African states of their sovereignty.

Burgis also debunks the prevalent image of Africa as a burden to the world and one that contributes little to the global economy. As he pointed out, ‘[o]utsiders often think of Africa as a great drain of philanthropy, a continent that guzzles aid to no avail and contributes little to the global economy in return’. Lending further evidence to the findings of the African Union/United Nations Economic Commission for Africa’s High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows from Africa headed by former South African President Thabo Mbeki that Africa gives far more money ($50 billion by way of illicit financial flows) than it receives in aid, Burgis observes that a close look at the resource industry shows that the relationship between Africa and the rest of the world is far from what the recipient-donor narrative presents. The ‘basic commodities that lie in abundance in Africa remain the primary ingredient of the global economy’, with fuel and mineral exports from Africa in 2010, for example, accounting for $333 billion, more than seven times the value of the aid that went in the opposite direction.

This introductory part of the book concludes with a presentation of what the looting machine is made up of – ‘networks of multinationals, middlemen and African potentates’ or ‘local potentates, oil executives, the mining magnets and the globetrotting middlemen’. In a way that more accurately captures the reality of the sources of Africa’s trouble, Burgis writes ‘[t]hese networks fuse state and corporate power’. He goes on to note that ‘[t]hey 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.’ As it becomes evident from the analysis in the various chapters of the book, other forces abetting and conniving with the looting machine include international law (particularly international trade and investment law), the global financial institutions, and the major economies where the leading extractive companies are domiciled and the price of the resources extracted from Africa are set.

In the rest of the chapters, the book interrogates with a hard-nosed approach the grip that the looting machine established across the breadth and width of Africa – from Angola and Nigeria with their oil, to the Democratic Republic of Congo with its coltan and diamonds, Guinea with its bauxite, Niger with its uranium, Ghana with its Gold, and South Africa with its platinum and diamond. It also reveals the way the looting machine operates both to keep the wrenched of these resource rich countries poor and to fuel the profits of multinational companies and the economies of the developed countries.

In Angola, where oil accounts for 98 percent of its exports and three-quarters of government’s income, the looting machine involved the political elite, the leadership of the national oil company Sonangol, a ‘bearded, bespectacled chinses man called Sam Pa’, Joe Bryant and extractive multinationals from China and the West. It operated not only on the basis of delivery to local officials ‘of a suitcase stuffed with cash’ but also the use of local companies that operate as a front for the stake that military, political and Sonangol officials take in the richest mining ventures of multinational companies such as Cobalt from the US and China Sonangol.

The systematic looting results in numerous disasters to the national economy, the environment, stability and security, state-society relationship, and generally to the social and economic welfare of the masses of the people of the affected countries. From the wars it funneled in Angola, the DRC and Nigeria to the military coup in Niger and to the Marikana massacre in South Africa, much of the trouble with Africa’s resource rich states is associated with the looting machine. Burgis writes, in relation to Nigeria, for example, the ethnic, religious and political violence that claimed the lives of ‘some eighteen thousand Nigerians between 1999 and 2012’ is ‘the result of Nigeria’s poisonous petro-politics.’ He goes on to note that in ‘these direct acts of violence alone – not counting all of the children slipping away in dilapidated hospitals, the drivers who meet their end on roads where maintenance contracts have been embezzled, and the victims of a police force that is more predator than protector – the Nigerian looting machine claims a life every six hours’.

Arguably, no other African country endured as much misfortune for its riches as the DRC. While the minerals in provinces such as the Katanga served as drivers of past conflicts, in more recent times the looting machine in the DRC fueled violence in the East of the country. The ‘coltan trade has helped fund local militias and foreign armies that have terrorized eastern Congo for two decades, turning what should be a paradise into a crucible of war.’

The Looting Machine also presents evidence of how the struggle over Africa’s resources between the West and China fuels conflict and military coup, best captured in the Chapter titled ‘When Elephants Fight, the Grass Gets Trampled’. Such was the case in Niger where, the struggle between France, former colonial ruler of Niger that ‘enjoyed a de facto monopoly on the staff that makes Niger a place of strategic importance – its uranium,’ and China, which furnished Niger’s President Tanja with huge sum of money ‘[i]n return for permits to dig uranium and rights to drill Niger’s previously untapped reservoirs of oil,’ reportedly contributed to the conflict involving the Tuareg rebellion and the coup against Tanja.

The looting machine operates through the instrumentality of the enormous bargaining power of extractive industries vis-à-vis weak African states. This involves the use of exploitative terms, tax doges or ‘transfer pricing’. ‘In gold mining,’ writes Burgis, ‘the standard rate of mining royalties …is settled at about 3 per cent across the continent, among the lowest anywhere in the world.’ It is in The Looting Machine that one comes close enough to realize the descriptions ‘pillaging Africa’ or ‘bleeding the countries of the continent’ to be no hyperbole but accurate representations of Africa’s experience with the extractive industries and the human rights protection vacuum. For example, Burgis reports of the $2.1 billion that the mining industry in Ghana generated in 2008, ‘the sum of royalties, taxes, and dividends from government stakes in mining ventures paid to the state was $146 million, or 7 per cent – and that is before factoring in the cost to the state of the subsidized electricity the mines use.’ This is, he rightly points out, ‘pittance compared with the 45 to 65 per cent that the IMF estimates to be the global average effective tax rate in mining’.

Secrecy of licensing contracts and exploitative terms are at the core of the systematic looting. In Niger, the licensing contracts of Areva, a French mining company that enjoyed monopoly in the extraction of uranium for decades, are not published but its most recent decade-long agreements running to the end of 2013 obtained by reporters showed that ‘Areva was exempt from paying duties both on the mining equipment it imported and the uranium it exported. The royalty…was 5.5 per cent on the uranium it mined, well below that charged by other, wealthier countries and locked in by a clause exempting the company from any increase in the rate under new mining laws.’

The looting machine does not stop with such exploitative terms. It siphons off more money even from the little that it offers to the institutionally weak African states. Thus, even ‘when African governments ignore the threats and blandishments of the World Bank and the resource industry and manage to secure a greater share of the revenues from oil and minerals (as DRC and Tanzania attempted to do, for example, during 2017/2018 by revising their mining laws), ‘there is little they can do to stop the torrent of money that flows out of their countries through tax fiddles made possible by the globalization of finance.’

Not surprisingly, Burgis makes it abundantly clear that despite the many changes there is substantial continuity between the colonial past and the post-colonial present, particularly in as far as the troubles that Africa endures from the extractive industry is concerned. He notes, ‘[i]n many African resource rich states the oil and mining industries took hold before independence, before the new born nations had had a chance to develop institutions to steward the common good and circumscribe arbitrary power’. Answering who the contemporary Cecil Rhodes that overlord on the continent are, Burgis has this to say ‘Areva in Niger, Shell in Nigeria, Glencore in Congo – they and others like them replicate in their sheer power over African nations the empires that came before them.’

Of course, Burgis is alive to the differences between the new resource empires and the old. Thus, in the middle of the book he observes the ‘power structure of the new resource empires differ from those that the likes of Rhodes built in one striking way: they comprise a lot more black faces at higher levels…Today in Africa’s resource states the local potentates are equal partners with the oil executives, the mining magnates and the globetrotting middlemen’, although this equality goes against his own analysis on the sheer power that these other actors are able to marshal. But this is not the only way that the new differs from the old. This is best captured in the introductory chapter, where Burgis observes ‘[w]here 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 doges to bleed profit from destitute nations.’

So, who benefits and who suffers from the looting machine and the accompanying human rights protection vacuum? One obvious category of beneficiary is the African potentates and the losers are the ordinary Nigerian, Angolan, Congolese, South African, Ghanaian or Nigerian woman. As Burgis also points out, the disparity – between life in the places where those resources fueling the world economy (of the era of communications technology) are found and the places where the price of the resources are set and the benefits are consumed – ‘gives an indication of where the benefits of the oil and mining trade accrue – and why most Africans still barely scrap by.’ Thus, ‘for every woman who dies in childbirth in France, a hundred die in the desert nation of Niger, a prime source of the uranium that fuels France’s nuclear-powered economy. The average Finn or South Korean can expect to live to eighty, nurtured by economies among whose most valuable companies are, respectively, Nokia and Samsung, the world’s top two mobile phone manufacturers. By contrast, if you happen to be born in the DRC, home to some of the planet’s richest deposits of the minerals that are crucial to manufacture of mobile phone batteries, you’ll be lucky to make it past fifty.’

In her review of The Looting Machine, Michela Wrong charges that ‘Frustratingly, Burgis never addresses the question of what can be done to halt — or at least brake — the systematic looting.’ But the book is principally about tracing and identifying the actors and mechanisms that make up the looting machine – the political elites, local militias or warlords, the middlemen, the lawyers and accountants, the extractive companies and the wider trading and investment legal regime. While what can be done has not been the focus of the book, in the afterword of the book Burgis asks, by way of starting the discussion on what needs to be done, ‘what if companies were subject to a duty of care to prevent corruption’? a standard higher than the current standard of due diligence advanced in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which leaves a lot of room for doing little or nothing.

In the work that the ACHPR’s Working Group on Extractive Industries, Environment and Human Rights have undertaken since at least I took the responsibility of chairing it, it has made its major focus on filling in the legal gaps that continue to enable the looting machine or the systematic looting of Africa and the attendant human rights abuses and violations. These efforts have produced key normative instruments, notably Resolution 367 of the African Commission and the State Reporting Guidelines and Principles on Articles 21 and 24 of the African Charter that have the potential to improve the natural resource governance regime in Africa. Perhaps it is in these and similar other efforts such as the process within the UN for developing a binding business and human rights treaty that Wrong can find answer to her frustrations on Burgis’s ‘brave, defiant book’, as she described The Looting Machine.