The Looting Machine

332 Pages·2015·3.7 MB·English

by  Tom Burgis

Copyright
William Collins
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WilliamCollinsBooks.com
This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2015
Copyright © Tom Burgis 2015
Tom Burgis asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Map © John Gilkes Cover photographs © George Esiri/Reuters/Corbis (woman);
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Source ISBN: 9780007523085
Ebook Edition © February 2015 ISBN: 9780007523115
Version: 2015-01-22
Dedication
FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER,
FAND THEIR KITCHEN TABLE

Author’s Note
I
N LATE 2010 I started to feel sick. At first I put the constant nausea down to a
bout of malaria and a stomach bug I’d picked up during a trip a few months
earlier to cover an election in Guinea, but the sickness persisted. I went back to
the UK for what was meant to be a week’s break before wrapping up in Lagos,
the Nigerian megacity where I was based as the Financial Times’s west Africa
correspondent. A doctor put a camera down my throat and found nothing. I
stopped sleeping. I jumped at noises and found myself bursting into tears. At the
end of the week I was walking to a shop to buy a newspaper for the train ride to
the airport when my legs gave way. I postponed my flight and went to another
doctor, who sent me to a psychiatrist. In the psychiatrist’s office I started to
explain that I was exhausted and bewildered, and I was soon sobbing
uncontrollably. The psychiatrist told me I had severe depression and that I
should be admitted to a psychiatric ward immediately. There I was put on
diazepam, a drug for anxiety, and antidepressants. After a few days in the
hospital it became apparent that there was something else tormenting me in
tandem with depression.
Eighteen months earlier I had travelled from Lagos to Jos, a city on the fault
line between Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north and largely Christian south,
to cover an outbreak of communal violence. I arrived in a village on the outskirts
not long after a mob had set fire to houses and their occupants, among them
children and a baby. I took photographs, counted bodies, and filed my story.
After a few days trying to understand the causes of the slaughter, I set off for the
next assignment. Over the months that followed, when images of the corpses
flashed before my mind’s eye, I would instinctively force them out, unable to
look at them.
The ghosts of Jos appeared at the end of my hospital bed. The women who
had been stuffed down a well. The old man with the broken neck. The baby –
always the baby. Once the ghosts had arrived, they stayed. The psychiatrist and a
therapist who had worked with the army – both of them wise and kind – set
about treating what was diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A
friend of mine, who has seen his share of horrors, devised a metaphor through
which to better understand PTSD. He compares the brain to one of those
portable golf holes with which golfers practise their putting. Normally the balls
drop smoothly into the hole, one experience after another processed and
consigned to memory. But then something traumatic happens – a car crash, an
assault, an atrocity – and that ball does not drop into the hole. It rattles around
the brain, causing damage. Anxiety builds until it is all-consuming. Vivid and
visceral, the memory blazes into view, sometimes unbidden, sometimes
triggered by an association – in my case, a violent film or anything that had been
burned.
Steadfast family and friends kept me afloat. Mercifully, there were moments
of bleak humour during my six weeks on the ward. When the BBC presenter
welcoming viewers to coverage of the wedding of Prince William and Kate
Middleton declared, ‘You will remember where you were on this day for the rest
of your life,’ the audience of addicts and depressives in the patients’ lounge
broke into a chorus of sardonic laughter and colourful insults aimed at the
screen.
The treatment for PTSD is as simple as it is brutal. Like an arachnophobe who
is shown a drawing of a spider, then a video of one, then gradually exposed to
the real thing until he is capable of fondling a tarantula, I tried to face the
memories from Jos. Armed only with some comforting aromas – chamomile and
an old, sand-spattered tube of sunscreen, both evocative of happy childhood days
– I wrote down my recollections of what I had seen, weeping onto the paper as
my therapist gently urged me on. Then, day after day, I read what I had written
aloud, again and again and again and again.
Slowly my terror eased. What it left behind was guilt. I felt I ought to suffer as
those who died had – if not in the same way, then somehow to the same degree.
The fact that I was alive became an unpayable debt to the dead. Only after
months had passed came a day when I realized that I had to choose: if I were on
trial for the slaughter at Jos, would a jury of my peers – rather than the stern
judge of my imaginings – find me guilty? I chose peace, to let the ghosts rest.
It was not, however, a complete exoneration. I had reported that ‘ethnic
rivalries’ had triggered the massacres in Jos, as indeed they had. But rivalries
over what? Nigeria’s 170 million people are mostly extremely poor, but their
nation is, in one respect at least, fabulously wealthy: exports of Nigerian crude
oil generate revenues of tens of billions of dollars each year.
I started to see the thread that connects a massacre in a remote African village
with the pleasures and comforts that we in the richer parts of the world enjoy. It
weaves through the globalized economy, from war zones to the pinnacles of
power and wealth in New York, Hong Kong and London. This book is my
attempt to follow that thread.
A frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.
—WILLIAM BURROUGHS, Naked Lunch
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Author’s Note
Epigraph
Introduction: A Curse of Riches
1. Futungo, Inc.
2. ‘It Is Forbidden to Piss in the Park’
3. Incubators of Poverty
4. Guanxi
5. When Elephants Fight, the Grass Gets Trampled
6. A Bridge to Beijing
7. Finance and Cyanide
8. God Has Nothing to Do with It
9. Black Gold
10. The New Money Kings
Epilogue: Complicity
Picture Section
Notes
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Publisher