I finished listening to the audiobook of Tom Burgess’s “The Looting Machine” today. The narrator (Dugald Bruce Lockhart) was great, I don’t think I’d have finished this book if I hadn’t consumed it as an audiobook. I was expecting it to be more of a chronological story on what happend in the various African countries since their independence, but the book wasn’t like that. Instead it was more like a fact dump or an investigative journalism book. Not to say the book wasn’t great for that reason, just that it isn’t what I was expecting.
And also, while I understood the central theme that resource driven economies are usually worser off than others (because everyone is focussed on extracting resources, not developing industries, and corruption is rampant because those in power want to make money and don’t really have to care about the citizens because they can oppress them) what I didn’t understand was that at times the author seemed to be suggesting this was also partly the fault of Western countries and that they were responsible for this. Maybe that wasn’t the author’s intention and I misunderstood. To me it felt more like it wasn’t about Africans or Westerners etc., but more about people or power structures in general in that resource based economies tend to have all these characteristics, and if a country manages to escape that “fate” it is more the exception than the norm. And yes, rich companies encourage and make it easier for those in power in such countries to exploit others, and yes most of these are nascent economies and they didn’t really get a chance to have their structures in place before drowning in all this wealth and thus there was an even greater likelihood of things going bad.
Anyways, a good book, I enjoyed it.
Link to a Guardian review.