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A Man of the People by Chinua Achebe (1966)

‘Big man, big palaver’
(The one-eyed thug, Dogo, describing Chief the Honourable N.A. Nanga in A Man of the People, page 15)

The Africa trilogy

Achebe’s previous three novels – Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964) – are grouped together under the title of the ‘African Trilogy’. They are all told in the free indirect style, meaning they have an omniscient third-person narrator but that narrator tells everything from the point of view of a central protagonist, at moments entering deep into their minds and thought processes so we see the world from their point of view.

Books 1 and 3 of the trilogy are entirely set within the world and mindset of ‘backward’ ‘primitive’ tribal people from a subset of the Igbo people of south-east Nigeria. Their whole point is to immerse you in the mindset, beliefs and practices of these people and make you understand that they in fact had a deep and rich cultural and spiritual life, complicated customs, laws and processes for managing themselves, most of which were brutally over-ridden with the advent of white Europeans, specifically British imperial administrators.

Book 2 is set in the contemporary world (i.e. around 1957/58) but is also told in the free indirect style, and has the protagonist, Obi Okonkwo, frequently returning to the undeveloped village of his birth and ancestors. It’s also tied into the trilogy because the protagonist, Obi, is the grandson of the central figure of the first book, Okonkwo.

A Man of The People

The point is that A Man of the People marks a significant break with the trilogy. It is still set in Nigeria but it is a) very much the contemporary Nigeria of 1964 and b) above all, it is told in the first person.

It is a first-person narrative told by a young male teacher, Odili Samalu (full name p.23). It is a mazy narrative, punctuated with lots of flashbacks. In these we learn about Odili’s boyhood in the village of Urua, his success at the local school, winning a scholarship to university, his womanising student days, travelling to London to do a post-graduate certificate in teaching, then his decision to take up a teaching post at an out of the way private or grammar school in the town of Anata. He has been teaching there for 18 months (p.8).

Chief the Honourable N.A. Nanga

The present part of the narrative kicks off in 1964 when this school is paid a visit by an eminent Nigerian politician and cabinet minister, Chief the Honourable N.A. Nanga.

It turns out that Odili has a history with Nanga. Back in 1948 Nanga had been Odili’s teacher in standard three and Odili had been one of his favourite pupils. Then the narrative jumps to 1960 and political events which first disillusioned Odili with his country’s politicians.

A general election was imminent. The world price of coffee had collapsed throwing the Nigerian economy into crisis. The Minister of Finance, Dr Makinde, who had a PhD in Economics presented a well worked out plan for dealing with the public finances which would require cuts to public services. Because of the election, the Prime Minister said no and abruptly sacked not only the Finance Minister but also the majority of the cabinet which had backed him. He instructed the central bank to start printing money, which led to the high rate of inflation which is still dogging the country as the narrative opened. But much worse, he launched fierce attacks on the Finance Minister, calling him and those who backed the plan conspirators and traitors and saboteurs working with foreign powers to undermine the country. Press and radio echoed these cries and ambitious MPs in Parliament joined in, yelping like jackals, like a ‘pack of bench hounds, at their prey.

Odili happened to be in the public gallery of the Parliament when the Prime Minister made this speech and was appalled at the naked greed, the unleashing of public hatred, and lickspittle sycophancy he saw on display. Among the lead jackals baying for a place in the cabinet was the Chief the Honourable N.A. Nanga who Odili is welcoming to his private school.

From the day a few years before when I had left Parliament depressed and aggrieved, I had felt, like so many other educated citizens of our country, that things were going seriously wrong without being able to say just how. We complained about our country’s lack of dynamism and abdication of the leadership to which it was entitled in the continent, or so we thought. We listened to whispers of scandalous deals in high places – sometimes involving sums of money that I for one didn’t believe existed in the country. But there was really no hard kernel of fact to get one’s teeth into. (p.39)

So a central strand of the novel is a portrait of this corrupt politician who embodies everything Achebe thinks is wrong with Nigerian politics in the first few years after independence.

  • he presents himself as a great benefactor of his people, dispensing largesse at every opportunity
  • despite having two wives, Nanga has a mistress (a ‘parlour wife’, p.22) he has appointed to various profitable positions within his portfolio with the result that she is festooned with expensive clothes and accessories
  • he is accompanied everywhere by a journalist writing down his wit and wisdom and feeding positive stories to the press
  • and by an entourage which includes ‘a huge, tough-looking’ security guard
  • full of himself, Nanga has had numerous streets, avenues and so on named after him

And he’s stupid (see below). Nanga invites Odili to look him up next time he’s in the capital (of the region, Bori, not Lagos, capital of Nigeria), saying ‘we must promote clever people like you’ etc.

First Odili goes to visit his father, Hezekiah Samalu, in his home village of Urua. They have an argument because his father is about to marry his fifth wife (Odili’s mother died in childbirth).

With Nanga in the capital

Then Odili takes Nanga up on his invitation, pays a social call on him in Bori and finds himself invited to stay in the minister’s huge mansion, being taken the houses of his fellow cabinet ministers,

What comes across loud and clear is that within a few years of independence all the elements are in place for Nigeria’s decline and fall. Universal corruption. Politics seen as not an opportunity to serve the country but to garner position, power and wealth for yourself, your family and clan. Over indulgence in the trappings of power i.e. big cars, huge houses, every mod con, bodyguards, multiple wives. Extreme rhetoric whereby ministers or authority figures constantly scream about murder, poisoning, conspiracies and so on, and are correspondingly hysterical in their threats of punishment, torture, death and so on. The assumption right from the start that the press is not there to be a free and critical part of the system of checks and balances but a medium of propaganda to be whipped into line.

Achebe is well aware of all this, it’s the issue at the core of the book:

A man who has just come in from the rain and dried his body and put on dry clothes is more reluctant to go out again than another who has been indoors all the time. The trouble with our new nation – as I saw it then lying on that bed – was that none of us had been indoors long enough to be able to say ‘To hell with it’. We had all been in the rain together until yesterday. Then a handful of us – the smart and the lucky and hardly ever the best – had scrambled for the one shelter our former rulers left, and had taken it over and barricaded themselves in. And from within they sought to persuade the rest through numerous loudspeakers, that the first phase of the struggle had been won and that the next phase – the extension of our house – was even more important and called for new and original tactics; it required that all argument should cease and the whole people speak with one voice and that any more dissent and argument outside the door of the shelter would subvert and bring down the whole house. (p.37)

We see plenty of examples of Nanga creaming off backhanders and bribes which are called ‘dash’. Odili’s own father is more in turn with general opinion than his priggish son:

My father’s attitude to my political activity intrigued me a lot. He was, as I think I have already indicated, the local chairman of P.O.P. in our village, Urua, and so I expected that his house would not contain both of us. But I was quite wrong. He took the view (without expressing it in so many words) that the mainspring of political action was personal gain, a view which, I might say, was much more in line with the general feeling in the country than the high-minded thinking of fellows like Max and I. (p.114)

According to the publisher’s summary on the cover the book is intended to be a comedy (‘a very funny satire’ opines Angus Wilson) but: 1) nothing in any of it made me laugh except for one sentence at the very end (see below), and 2) instead it felt like a grim anticipation of the 60 years since independence during which Nigeria has become one of the most violent, unequal and corrupt places on earth (ranked 150th out of 180 countries for corruption by Transparency International).

Plot summary

Odili is a schoolteacher at a country grammar school. Cabinet minister the Honourable N.A. Nanga comes to address the school. Odili reminds him that he was his teacher back in 1948 and tells him he want to university, then did a PGCE in Britain, before returning to become a teacher. Nanga invites Odili to come and stay with him in his luxurious government mansion in Bori. Here Odili has sex with a white married woman guest of Nanga’s but when he then invites his own girlfriend, Elsie, to stay the night, she prefers to have sex with the chief, prompting Odili to storm out and go and stay with his friend, the lawyer Maxwell Kulamo. Maxwell inducts him into a new political party they’re setting up named the Common People’s Convention (CPC). There’s a meeting of the small steering committee which includes a trade unionist and someone from an Eastern Bloc country, though they’re all careful to emphasise that they’re not communists. Also, none of them are working class i.e. the people. Odili is surprised to learn the party’s backer is a minister in the existing government. At a stroke I guessed he’s encouraging the CPC as part of an internal powerplay. Odili goes back to his town, and pays two visits, one to Chief Nanga’s ‘bush wife’ who is tired and bitter that he’s taking up with a new young parlour wife; and then the young wife-to-be of Nanga, Edna, and her protective greedy father. Odili offers to give Edna a lift on the back of his bicycle to visit her mother in hospital, taking a home-made lunch but like an idiot manages to crash it, spilling all the food in the sandy road and grazing her knee. Ouch. Odili is in a campaign to seduce and sleep with Edna, maybe taking her virginity, in revenge for Nanga bedding Elsie. It’s like a children’s game with women as the winnings.

A corruption scandal blows up and brings down the government. An election is called. Odili announces he is going to contest Nanga’s seat which consists of five villages, including his home village Urua and Nanga’s base, Anata. This is on page 100 of this 150-page book so exactly two-thirds through. He encounters resistance in Anata. The principle of his school, Mr Nwege, sacks him. Like all the characters, Odili can’t behave politely but starts insulting Nwege who is instantly enraged and runs to get his shotgun, so Odili flees (p.102). Everyone is so quick to anger, insult then violence. When Odili tries to gain admission to Edna’s hospital the gateman doesn’t tell him private cars aren’t allowed in but shouts at him ‘like a mad dog’. I don’t see how this is comic. It is symptomatic of the high levels of anger and intemperance throughout the text. They even frighten the protagonist:

I reflected on the depth of resentment and hatred from which such venom came – and for no other reason than that I owned a car, or seemed to own one! It was depressing and quite frightening. (p.104)

He then drives over to Edna’s place and when she lets him in she is petrified that her father, who’s popped out for a poo, will kill him when he returns. She is literally shaking with fear (p.104). And when the father sees Odili, he does, indeed, run to fetch his machete with the aim of hacking him to death. I don’t see how this is funny. They manage to calm him down but as Odili leaves, Edna’s father threatens to beat her. Funny?

The election campaign commences and Odili has to hire bodyguards, a main on, Boniface, a violent thug, and three assistants, plus load up on weapons which eventually included machetes and two shotguns. The youth wing of Nanga supporters carry violent placards and attack his rallies. In his essay ‘The trouble with Nigeria’ Achebe claims it’s the corrupt and badly educated leadership – he says nothing about this resort to anger and violence which characterises every level of public discourse.

Anyway, Chief Nanga drives up in a Cadillac full of bodyguards to Odili’s father’s house and very smoothly converts the father, over a new bottle of whisky describing how abominably his son behaved in abusing his hospitality etc. Then Nanga offers Odili a scholarship for further study plus £250 to pack in his campaign. He’s going to lose anyway, Do what his buddy Maxwell has already done, which is take the money and stand down.

In fact Nanga was lying and the next day max and the rest of the team (a dozen organisers) roll up to help Odili with his campaign bringing a car, a minibus and two new Land Rovers with loudspeakers fitted on the roofs. They hold a rally with Max declaiming through the speakers but the crowd is apathetic and replies with two points: 1) the politicians may be corrupt, but so is almost everybody down to the lowliest council official and storekeeper, so an attack on ‘corruption’ is actually an attack on the very ‘people’ the CPC claims to be standing for, and 2) nobody expects the CPC to be any different, everybody expects them to join the existing political parties, the P.O.P. and P.A.P. on the gravy train (p.125).

Max tells Odili he did take a bribe from his opponent in his constituency (Max and Odili are fighting campaigns in adjoining constituencies), £1,000 from Chief Koko – it’s what paid for the shiny new Land Rovers – but he won’t honour the terms of the deal, he won’t stop campaigning.

Things start to go wrong. Odili’s father is expelled from his party (just to be clear, his dad was a treasurer of the established opposition party the P.O.P.), then tax inspectors came demanding a new, much bigger payment, and could only be persuaded not to arrest him with the payment of a cash bribe (£24). How can Odili, Max and their dozen friends hope to change the embedded practices of an entire society?

Next day the village Crier announces there is only one candidate worth voting for, Chief Nanga. The message is repeated on the radio. A message comes that his father’s expulsion from his party will be reversed if he simply signs a document dissociating himself from his son’s (Odili’s) subversive activities.

A day or two later Nanga holds the inaugural rally of his campaign. Foolishly, Odili decides to attend. He tries to mingle with the crowd but one of Nanga’s creatures spots him and Nanga immediately tells the crowd to seize him. So Odili is manhandled to the front of the crowd and then taken by minders up onto the stage where Nanga reads out the long list of his bad behaviour, treachery and scheming, as the roars of anger get louder. Then Nanga playfully hands the microphone to Odili so the crowd can hear his excuses but he doesn’t get further than ‘I came to tell the people that you are a liar…’ before Nanga slaps him, then lots of other fists are pummeling then something hard feels like it is cracking his skull and he loses consciousness.

When he awakes it is to find he has a cracked skull, a broken arm, and bruises to his groin where he was heartily kicked by Nanga’s henchmen. He is confused for weeks and only slowly finds out he is under arrest for having dangerous weapons in his car (the machetes and shotguns), a car Nanga’s thugs ransacked, turned over and set on fire. In fact the charge was dropped once it was clear Odili wasn’t going to sign his nomination papers to stand as a candidate (he thought he’s already submitted them but they were intercepted by Nanga’s thugs).

Anyway the day of the election comes and goes and Odili is still in bed recovering. When he hears that his good friend Maxwell was killed in his electioneering, in the process of investigating vote rigging, he suffers a relapse. Max was run over as he was getting out of his vehicle by thugs of Chief Koko’s. For some reason Koko is nearby and Max’s girlfriend, Eunice, gets a gun out of her handbag and shoots Koko dead, before she’s arrested.

On election night the gangs assembled by these ruling MPs, Nanga and Koko, get out of control and go on the rampage, attacking markets, burning and looting, which lasts for days.

At first the Prime Minister is re-elected and selects all the cabinet who had been disgraced, including Nanga. Violence continues across the country and he assures foreign investors the country is safe and stable.

Meanwhile, in the love interest part of the story, Edna has been visiting him. Turns out she refused to marry Nanga. Turns out she loves Odili. This is very inconsistent with the scene where she shouted at him to leave her house (?) but it does provide the standard happy ending of the slight comic novel.

When he finally gets out of hospital he and his father go and see Edna’s father to begin a ‘conversation’ about marrying her. Edna’s father says no but then history takes a hand. In the only thing that made me smile in the whole book, I liked the phrasing of:

But the Army obliged us by staging a coup at that point and locking up every member of the Government. The rampaging bands of election thugs had caused so much unrest and dislocation that our young Army officers seized the opportunity to take over. We were told Nanga was arrested trying to escape by canoe dressed like a fisherman. Thereafter we made rapid progress with Edna’s father who, no doubt, saw me then as a bird in hand… (p.147)

So there’s a military coup, the entire existing government is thrown in prison, and Odili ends up with the girl. Happy ending, of sorts.

The final thought of the book is Odili’s complete disillusion with the people of Nigeria, because the day after the coup the entire population, from the loftiest intellectuals to the lowliest latrine cleaners, like the population of Oceania in Nineteen Eighty-Four, completely and absolutely switches its allegiance from the old regime, which it now reviles, to the new one, which it fulsomely praises.

So the novel ends on a note, I thought, of real despair. In his essay The trouble with Nigeria Achebe famously wrote that it’s Nigeria’s main problem has been its appalling leaders. The implication, in fact the explicit conclusion of this book, is that this is not the case. But the real trouble with Nigeria, the last pages of this novel imply, is its people.

Note

I now proceed to say some very blunt things about the stupidity, childishness, ignorance, quickness to anger and swift resort to violence which characterises the world of the novel and, if it is in any way intended as a depiction of his native country, of Nigeria as a whole. I felt nervous doing this but have just finished reading Achebe’s 1983 essay The Trouble with Nigeria and have discovered that everything I comment on is raised and worried over in that essay. In other words, the negative qualities I discuss in the next few sections are aspects of Nigerian life which Achebe himself lamented. In other words, the novel deliberately paints Nigerian political and social life in almost as unflattering light as he could manage, almost as if he wanted to stun his country into reform.

Stupidity

It’s a tactless thing to write but what really comes across from the book is not that Nanga or any of his cabinet colleagues are especially corrupt – they are, of course, but the real take-home is that they’re just stupid, very stupid; stupid, ignorant and uneducated. All Nanga’s charisma and loud-talking makes it easy to forget the surprising fact that he is, as Odili tells us, ‘barely literate’ (p.47). And he was a teacher!

I know the novel is packed with the moral fol-de-rol which GCSE students are told to waste their time writing essays about (‘Was Odili right to do x?’, ‘What options does Edna have in a patriarchal society?’ etc) – but surely the important dynamic is established early on, in that story about the Minister of Finance, who had a PhD in public finance and a sound plan, being sacked and vilified by the Prime Minister and the lickspittle press and replaced by Nanga, who is a loudmouthed ignoramus.

It’s not me imposing this on the text – the young university-educated characters (Odili, Maxwell, Kadabie) themselves comment on the ignorance of their leaders. Here’s Odili’s friend, the lawyer Maxwell:

‘That’s all they care for,’ he said with a solemn face. ‘Women, cars, landed property. But what else can you expect when intelligent people leave politics to illiterates like Chief Nanga?’ (p.76)

And one of the villagers, an elderly man. Max addresses in a campaign rally freely admits the people’s ignorance:

‘We are ignorant people and we are like children.’ (p.126)

Not everyone can go away to university. Hardly anyone gets to go and be educated in Britain. Meanwhile 99% of the population continues illiterate and soaked in its traditional beliefs, namely that the tribal chieftain’s first job is to provide for his people. Out of that venerable, traditional, tribal, people’s assumption comes the corrupt structure of most African countries’ political and economic systems.

Quick to anger

I’ve highlighted the little sequence of characters getting irrationally furious (the hospital gatekeeper, Edna’s father, gangs of Nanga’s supporters). But the protagonist, Odili, is like this, extremely quick to take violent offence. And so is his father. When Nanga visits them at their house in Urua, Odili refuses to put his newspaper down so his father, instantly super enraged, steps towards him as if to hit him (p.115). When Edna’s brother doesn’t immediately go and fetch Edna when he pays her family a visit, Odili immediately starts shouting at the poor boy (p.129). After Edna has given him a good dressing-down, the brother warns Odili that the minder set on her by Nanga will castrate him (Odili) if he finds him there in Edna’s house (p.129). Then, of course, Odili is badly beaten up on Nanga’s campaign stage. And then his friend Max is murdered by his political opponent, Chief Koko.

Can’t everyone just try to calm down and be civil to each other?

Childish

Much of the behaviour of a lot of the characters, comes over as petulant and childish. The narrator is touchy:

‘Hello, Jalio,’ I said, stretching my hand to shake his… He replied hello and took my hand but obviously he did not remember my name and didn’t seem to care particularly. I was very much hurt by this and immediately formed a poor opinion of him and his silly airs. (p.62)

A trait which forms the spine of the plot when he makes his juvenile determination to get his own back on Chief Nanga for sleeping with his girlfriend, by sleeping with his future wife (Edna).

The same tetchy quickness to feel insulted comes over in Nanga’s touchiness about what journalists write about him and his heartfelt wish to muzzle and silence them.

It explains why all the characters’ political ideas are blunt and stupid as a child’s: to acquire more money and power; muzzle the press; intimidate other political parties; throw anyone who disagrees with them in prison. In fact most of the satire is at Odili’s expense because he never has any idea how to run a country or an economy, he has no policies or ideas of any kind except to get his own back on Chief Nanga.

It’s not that it’s corrupt or wicked so much as that it’s childish, a childishly inadequate mentality for running a country.

‘We are ignorant people and we are like children.’ (p.126)

And it’s this childishness, this immature petulance and resentment of any criticism, which the outside world was to hear in the angry speeches of African leaders like Patrice Lumumba, lashing out at the West for not helping him tackled Congo’s chaotic crises, the angry rants of Idi Amin or Robert Mugabe or Thabo Mbeki, over the decades to come.

Over-symbolising

This is connected to something else I noticed, which is the way all the characters (the meaningful characters i.e. the men, in this patriarchal narrative) madly over-inflate even the tiniest incident into being symbolic of The State of Nigeria. When Nanga shags Odili’s ‘good-time girl’, the latter delivers a long aggressive diatribe to the startled older man, but what stood out for me is when he says ‘What a country!’ as if one man sleeping with another man’s girlfriend somehow typifies an entire nation.

But that is exactly how the narrator thinks. Everywhere he looks he sees symbols and allegories of Nigeria’s present and portents of its future. It explains his conviction in the novel’s last 30 pages or so that the gimcrack little ‘party’ he and his schoolchum have cobbled together is somehow ‘our society’s only hope of salvation’ (p.128). Similarly, when Edna tells him to buzz off and leave him alone, Odili is immature enough to make it hugely symbolical:

What I felt was sadness—a sadness deep and cool like a well, into which my hopes had fallen; my twin hopes of a beautiful life with Edna and of a new era of cleanliness in the politics of our country. (p.130)

I think it was this incorporation of a supposedly ‘political’ element in the novel which led critics to praise it and give it its status. Yet just having your character constantly worrying that every little event somehow threatens the very future of his country, nay the whole of Africa!! doesn’t really amount to political analysis. The opposite. It makes him sound like any saloon bar bore droning on about the country going to the dogs.

Sex

Odili is highly sexed and lets us know it. He describes his sexual exploits at university. He tells us he slept with his current girlfriend, Elsie, a nurse, within an hour of meeting her. There’s a dinner for some foreign guests of Nanga’s and he ends up sleeping with the white American, Jean. This doesn’t stop him going to see Elsie the next day and trying to sleep with her. He has a role model in his father who has four wives and is about to wed a fifth, thus being able to have sex with any of five women.

And it spills over into Odili’s initially tolerant attitude to Nanga, who has two wives, a mistress, and is expected to have sex with any of his (especially foreign) guests who are up for it – ‘a man who had so many women ready to make themselves available’ (p.60), who has sex with an educated woman lawyer paying her £25 a pop (p.127).

While he stayed in his household, Odili and Nanga ‘swapped many tales of conquest’ (p.59) and the text shares some humorous anecdotes about these sexual ‘conquests’ with us. When Nanga asks about Elsie Odili dismisses her as a ‘good-time girl’ (p.59) i.e. not marriage material. In a taxi with Elsi, Odili throbs with anticipation, Elsie dressed up for a party ‘looks ripe and ready’ (p.68), sex indeed throbs through many of the pages.

This may well be an accurate depiction of a modern (1964) Nigerian young man but it felt like a shame. One of the many appeals of the African trilogy was its tremendous chasteness about sex which was almost never mentioned. Both casual sex and adultery barely seem to have existed in the tribal culture Achebe describes in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God and this is one of the aspects which gives them such a chaste, monumental, timeless aspect, like Homer.

Not so in this novel which throbs with sweaty male sexuality and often feels as seedy and sordid as the nastier Kingsley Amis novels. We learn about ‘ the unsettling effect which imminent fulfilment always has on’ Odili and that his fantasies about Elsie are so intense that one night he had a wet dream so messy he had to change his pyjamas. When Elsie decides to sleep with the rich cabinet minister instead of Odili, the latter goes on a long soulful walk round Bori and calls her a ‘common harlot’ (p.71), all of which feels insufferably childish.

The book cover tells us that Anthony Burgess included A Man of The People in his personal selection of the 99 best novels in English since 1939. To be unfair, maybe this was partly because Achebe had managed to reproduce the casual sexism and political simple-mindedness of a British writer like Kingsley Amis in an African setting.

Pidgin

A pidgin or pidgin language:

is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common. Typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from several languages…A pidgin is a simplified means of linguistic communication as it is constructed impromptu, or by convention, between individuals or groups of people. A pidgin is not the native language of any speech community, but is instead learned as a second language.

All the African characters in A Man of The People slip into pidgin very easily and have extensive conversations in it:

‘I think I tell you say Chief Nanga de go open book exhibition for six today,’ I said.
‘Book exhibition?’ asked Elsie. ‘How they de make that one again?’
‘My sister, make you de ask them for me-o. I be think say na me one never hear that kind thing before. But they say me na Minister of Culture and as such I suppose to be there. I no fit say no. Wetin be Minister? No be public football? So instead for me to sidon rest for house like other people I de go knack grammar for this hot afternoon. You done see this kind trouble before?’ (p.60)

According to the narrator pidgin has an inbuilt ‘levity’ or lack of seriousness so that merely switching to it lightens the mood or indicates jokiness. Similarly, switching out of it implies a refusal to be jokey or a switch to more serious subject matter (p.87).

I understood occasional words and phrases (this exchange starts out reasonably comprehensible) but almost all of it was impenetrable to me and so I ended up skipping all the dialogue in pidgin.

Beyond the novel

In case you think my judgements on the worldview and political and cultural situation depicted by the novel are harsh, here are some excerpts from Martin Meredith’s book The State of Africa (2011), from his chapter describing the build-up to the Nigerian military coup which took place in 1966, the year A Man of The People was published:

By nature, Nigerian politics tended to be mercenary and violent. Political debate was routinely conducted in acrimonious and abusive language; and ethnic loyalties were constantly exploited. The tactics employed were often those of the rough house variety… (p.194)

Of the 1965 general election in the Western region of Nigeria, he writes:

The campaign was fought on all sides with brutal tenacity; bribes, threats, assault, arson, hired thugs and even murder became the daily routine. Akintola’s new party – the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) – used its position in government ruthlessly to rig the election at every stage – blocking the nomination of opposition candidates, kidnapping election officials, destroying ballot papers and falsifying results… (p.198)

It was this environment of political chaos and violence which triggered the military coup launched in January 1966. Meredith describes it with a blunt candour which is worth reproducing for its shocking effect:

The hopes that Nigeria would serve as a stronghold of democracy in Africa came to an abrupt halt on 15 January 1966. In a series of coordinated actions, a group of young army officers wiped out the country’s top political leaders. In Lagos they seized the federal prime minister, Sir Adubakar Tafawa Balewa, took him outside the city and executed him by the side of the road, dumping his body in a ditch; in Kaduna, after a gun battle, they shot dead the premier of the Northern Region, the Sardauna of Sokoto. In Ibadan they killed the premier of the Western Region, Chief Ladoke Akintola. The wealthy federal finance minister, Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh, a notoriously corrupt politician, was dragged screaming from his house, flung into a car ‘like an old army sack’, and driven away to be murdered… (p.193)

The army leaders claimed to be not just staging a coup but sweeping away the entire old order, managed by corrupt elders. Two points:

1. Odili and Max talk about sweeping away the old regime, as if a dozen or twenty utopians with a few loudspeakers could ever do such a thing, but a) that was obviously always hopelessly naive and b) there are hints in the text that even if the CPC had won the election (impossible) they would have been sucked into the same patterns of corruption as the old guard. So only an actual revolution which decimated the old ruling class could have hoped to effect change.

2. But it didn’t effect change. Instead the country sank into further chaos triggered by the fact that most of the young military leaders were Igbo, which triggered resentment and then anti-Igbo violence in the north then west of the country, leading to huge flight of the Igbo minorities in both places back to their homeland in the south-east, and then the secession by the Igbo authorities, the declaration that they constituted a new independent country, Biafra. Which led to the Biafran War or The Nigerian Civil War (1967 to 1970) in which up to 2 million Igbo civilians died from famine.

This catastrophic background makes the naive political dreaming and petty personal feuds of A Man of the People‘s protagonist, Odili, look even more childish and superficial. In the real world this half decade of Nigeria’s history showed that it had basically three options: corrupt but essentially peaceful civilian rule; military coup and rule by the army; ruinous civil war. Of the three the first one, the one Idoli and his friends so fervently want to overthrow, is quite clearly the least bad.

In a sentence

Critics praise A Man of The People as a ‘political’ novel or for its ‘political’ content but, in my opinion, its so-called ‘political’ element is shallow, childish and completely inadequate to the catastrophic political and historical moment it purports to describe.

Credit

A Man of the People by Chinua Achebe was published in 1966 by William Heinemann. References are to the 1988 Heinemann African Writers series paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on January 24, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/01/24/a-man-of-the-people-chinua-achebe/

The Looting Machine by Tom Burgis (2015)

The looting machine: the alliance between shadow governments and the resource industry that tramples over the people who live where oil and minerals are found.
(The Looting Machine, page 158)

Burgis is a reporter for the Financial Times. In his acknowledgements, he thanks numerous other writers and editors from the FT and, indeed, The Looting Machine, despite its lurid title, has the feel of an extended Financial Times special report, one about corruption all across Africa. There are attempts at ‘colour’ i.e. descriptions of places (luxury hotels in Luanda, open cast mining in Congo) but for the most part it’s facts and figures, names and details of contracts and, volumes of oil or iron and, everywhere, amounts of money money money. Which makes sense as it’s a book-length investigation of how so many African ‘leaders’ have stolen money, scores of billions of dollars, belonging to their countries and peoples.

Many of the ideas – about the nature of Africa’s resource-based, rentier states – are familiar but what distinguishes Burgis’s book is the detailed research he has done to unearth and record the names of (some of the) companies and individuals who are responsible for looting Africa’s wealth. Other books talk about the leader of an African nation ‘and his circle’ or ‘the elite’ in general terms, whereas Burgis names names, identifying the right-hand men of dictators in Congo, Nigeria, Angola, and delves into the shady companies and crooked deals they do. By ‘crooked’ I mean deals whereby corrupt governments sell their mineral resources in such a way as to cream off huge amounts for themselves, at the expense of official government coffers, let alone the needs of their populations, while also conniving in the anti-transparency, profiteering practices of the multinational corporations they’re in bed with.

21st century Africa

What really comes over is that my thinking about Africa is out of date. It’s all very well rehashing the standard old complaints about imperialism and the scramble for Africa and the wicked colonial regimes and the arbitrary borders they imposed which split up tribes and forced completely dissimilar peoples together. Or telling off ‘the West’ and ‘western governments’ for not holding African governments to account or not supporting democracy enough or giving enough aid to help women and girls etc etc, in the style of Michela Wrong or Tim Butcher: the West must do this, that and the other, do more to blah blah…

What comes over is that all those old issues, true as they are, have been superseded by the new world, the 21st century. In the new Africa:

  1. A lot of this is a lost cause; the power structures of crony capitalism, patronage politics and kleptocracy have been in place for over 60 years. It’s going to take more than a UN resolution or ‘the West’ stamping its feet to change the culture of places like Nigeria or Angola at this late stage. They are what they are. So-called elections just replace one faction of the elite with a different faction. The kleptocracy is firmly in place.
  2. China and Russia. The complaints of writers like Butcher and Wrong and hundreds like them, that the West needs to be doing ‘more’, tend to ignore the reality on the ground that Russia, via the notorious Wagner group, have an ever-increasing military presence, especially in the Sahel region of Africa; and much the bigger reality that China is emerging as a decisive economic player all across the continent.

Concepts and categories

Over the past 60 years social scientists, political theorists and economists have gone over the reasons for Africa’s failure again and again. The same basic ideas recur and reappear under different headings or from different perspectives. They build up like a collage of overlapping ideas or terms. Here are some key ones which overlap and mesh together to form the conceptual foundations of Burgis’s critique:

Resource state

A state most of whose revenue comes from one or a handful of raw resources which it sells abroad, generally via multinational corporations. The completely undemocratic closed nature of these kinds of deals makes them a perfect site for kickbacks, bribes, finders’ fees, various ‘taxes’ and numerous other ways for the small elite controlling the state to cream off huge amounts into their personal bank accounts.

Resource economy

An economy heavily slanted towards the production of raw resources (oil, gas, copper, gold) which fails to diversity or invest in other sectors, for example agriculture or manufacturing. Burgis’s chapter about Nigeria is, a little surprisingly, less about the obvious corruption and wealth generated by Nigeria’s huge oil industry/resources, than a sad review of the collapse of its once-thriving textiles industry.

By half way through the book Burgis lets his anger and disgust shine through. He doesn’t refer to the president of Nigeria as the president of Nigeria but as ‘captain of Nigeria’s looting machine’ (p.201).

Shadow economy

A shadow economy includes all economic activities which are hidden from official state or international authorities for monetary, regulatory and institutional reasons. Monetary reasons include avoiding paying taxes. Institutional reasons include hiding from the general population, opposition politicians, the media, regulators, and donor governments, the extent to which you’re running a huge illegal economy.

Shadow state

A state in which the over, official forms of government are not where the real power lies. In a shadow state real power inheres in small personal networks among the elite. Shadow states are characterised by the corrupt distribution of state contracts among this elite, who may also have alliances with powerbrokers in the army or security services.

The personal state

State in which there is no distinction between the president or ruler, and state structures, especially when it comes to budget and bank accounts (p.27). Thus Mobutu of Zaire had revenue from all kinds of ‘state’ contracts, deals, taxes and so on, paid directly into his personal bank accounts and spent it as if it was his money, and so did his cronies. Money which should have been running the state, for example paying the police or maintaining the infrastructure, was instead spent building his palace in the jungle, buying swanky cars and top-end real estate in Paris and the South of France.

Kleptocracy

Where the ruler, his family and cronies, simply steal state money, usually on an epic scale.

In 2002 UN investigators appointed to study the illegal exploitation of Congo’s resources [identified] an ‘elite network’ of Congolese and Zimbabwean officials who were orchestrating the plunder of Congolese minerals under cover of war. ‘This network has transferred ownership of at least $5 billion of assets from the state mining sector to private companies under its control in the last three years with no compensation or benefit for the state or treasury of the Democratic Republic of Congo.’ (p.37)

Result: the disappearing roads, the vanished railway network, hospitals without medicines, abandoned schools and general collapse of Congo, as reported by Tim Butcher in Blood River. Burgis gives the details of a particular series of deals between the Congo state and private companies which, he claims, lost the state $1.36 billion in the 2 years between 2010 and 2012, more money than it received from humanitarian aid over the same period (p.52).

As Burgis gets more angry, he becomes more entertainingly abusive. These countries are not run by a ruling class but by a ‘looting class’ (p.203). Thus Nigerian analyst Clement Nwankwo describes the country’s largest political party, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) as ‘not a political party. It’s a platform to seize power and then share the resultant booty’ (p.203).

Cryptocracy

A form of government where the real leaders are hidden, or simply unknown. Overlaps with the universe of conspiracy theories where people believe there are hidden global or national conspiracies. In our context all it means is that sometimes the real movers and shakers, powerbrokers and big money men, work behind the scenes, anonymously.

Petrostate

A petrostate or oil state is a country whose economy is heavily dependent on the extraction and export of oil or natural gas. Merely producing oil and gas does not make a country a petrostate; Norway, Canada, and America are major oil producers but also have diversified economies. Petrostates do not have diversified economies, they rely on oil & gas exports for a large part of state revenue, which results in political and economic power becoming concentrated in the hands of an elite, and the spread of unaccountable corruption.

Take Angola where the elite are referred to as the Futungo, a few hundred closely connected families, named after Futungo da Belas, the old presidential palace (p.10). Oil accounts for 98% of Angola’s exports and about 75% of government income, and yet it provides just 1% of employment (p.13).

Or Nigeria where oil was discovered in the Niger delta in 1956 and the enormous wealth it generates for a small elite has ruined the country for 60 years. Oil accounts for 80% of Nigerian government revenue (p.63).

As a political economy took hold that was based on embezzlement and manipulating public office for private gain, government contracts for the upkeep of public goods that support industrialisation – a functioning electricity system among them – were diverted to the cronies of the rulers of the day. The patter was the same [in Nigeria] as in Angola or Congo: the more the non-oil economy withered, the greater the impulse to embezzle, perpetuating the cycle of looting. (p.76)

A petrostate is run by petropolitics which simply equate high office with theft (p.77).

A country where the ruler entrenches power in himself and his clique, using authoritarian security forces against any form of protest, is called a petro-dictatorship. The extreme brutality of the Equatorial Guinea regime is a good example. At one point Burgis coins the phrase petro-nightmare to describe Nigeria’s descent into corruptions and coups.

(Venezuela is another example of a petrostate, along with Ecuador, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Oman, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – but I can only cope with one continent at a time.)

Rentier state

A term coined by political scientists Hazem Beblawi and Giacomo Luciani, denoting countries which have undue reliance on one or several sources of rents such as mineral resources, notably oil and gas.

Rentier states derive most of their income from the extraction, processing and shipping of these resources. Government in a rentier state relies overwhelmingly on income from these industries and not on other sources of income such as general taxation. Therefore rentier states aren’t beholden to their populations but are characterised by autocratic paternalism. The media is commonly highly censored meaning that government and corporate corruption and institutional inefficiencies are easily concealed. From an economist’s point of view, this secrecy encourages inefficiencies and lack of competition, which tend to undermine the welfare, creativity, freedoms, and human development of their peoples. Reliance on one or a handful of commodities for national income means rentier states are vulnerable if commodity prices fall, if global demands falls, or when their resources are depleted.

Dutch disease

In the 1970s Holland discovered oil offshore and began drilling, extracting and refining it with great profits. Everyone was puzzled, then, when the Dutch economy as a whole fell into recession. Analysis showed that when a country comes to rely heavily on one or a handful of raw resources, it has a distorting and damaging effect on the rest of the economy, especially manufacturing and agriculture. Strong oil & gas exports drive up the value of the currency, making imports cheaper and exports more expensive (pages 69 to 70).

Thus Nigeria’s textile industry has been devastated because, when the currency rose on the back of the oil boom, it became cheaper to import cheap Chinese knock-offs of Nigerian fabrics than to make them themselves. In the mid-1980s it had 175 textile mills, now it has 25.

It is safe to say that the destruction of the Nigerian textile industry has blighted millions of lives. (p.65).

Over-investment in these industries at the expense of other sectors, such as manufacturing and agriculture, can hurt economic growth and competitiveness. Unless you make a conscious effort to support and encourage other aspects of the economy, a raw resource boom will tend to damage it. According to a 2003 World Bank report:

Between 1960 and 2000 poor countries that were rich in natural resources grew two to three times more slowly than those that were not. Over that period , of forty-five countries that failed to sustain economic growth, all but six were heavily dependent on oil or mining. (p.157)

Another bad effect is that undiversified reliance on oil and gas industries can cause political and economic crises when the price of oil drops. The entire system comes to a halt.

Resource curse

Research from the 70s, 80s and 90s all confirm the theory that countries with an abundance of natural resources (such as fossil fuels and certain minerals) tend to have less economic growth, less democracy, and worse development outcomes, than countries with fewer natural resources.

Research shows that oil wealth lowers levels of democracy and strengthens autocratic rule because political leaders in oil-rich countries refuse democratic development because they will have more to give up from losing power. Similarly, political leaders of oil-rich countries refuse democratic development because the political elite collects the revenues from the oil export and use the money for cementing its political, economic, and social power by controlling government and its bureaucracy.

No taxation, no democracy

In Western democracies governments regularly have to consult electors because we’re the ones who fund them. In a resource state or petrostate, most of the government’s income comes from licensing deals and rake-offs from refiners. The regime doesn’t get its money from the people so doesn’t care what happens to them or what they think. The rallying cry of the American revolutionaries in 1776 was ‘No taxation without representation’, well the population of a resource state doesn’t pay much tax and it gets no representation. Not relying on the people for its revenue, the government doesn’t care what they think (p.73).

Elections are the last thing the elite wants because it will disrupt the deals and contracts done with Western extractors and multinationals. The Nigerian government gets just 4% of its income from general taxation but about 70% from oil and gas revenues (p.73).

In a resource economy politics degrades down to different factions of the elite fighting for the loot, behaviour which encourages everyone at all levels of society to think and behave the same. High office becomes universally accepted as the opportunity not to serve but to steal (p.74).

Patronage politics

Patronage politics is the use of state resources to reward individuals for their electoral support. It is a type of corruption or favouritism in which a party in power rewards groups, families or ethnicities for their electoral support using illegal gifts or fraudulently awarded appointments or government contracts. There is a further consequence: patronage politics attracts crooks.

Crony capitalism

an economic system in which individuals and businesses with political connections and influence are favoured (as through tax breaks, grants, and other forms of government assistance) in ways seen as suppressing open competition in a free market. an economic system in which family members and friends of government officials and business leaders are given unfair advantages in the form of jobs, loans, etc.

A good example is the Futungo cabal of linked cronies who run Angola under the presidency of José Eduardo dos Santos, president from 1979 to 2017, whose daughter, Isabel dos Santos (born 1973), was Africa’s first woman billionaire and at one time the richest woman in Africa (p.10). The triumph of feminism? Not really. It’s deeply funny that this epitome of crony capitalism and kleptocracy was one of the BBC’s 100 women of 2015, so desperate are organisations like the BBC to fall over themselves to promote women, and especially black women (score double) even if it turns out that they’re world class crooks.

Or take Equatorial Guinea, continuing to enjoy relentless exploitation at the hands of its ruling family, relatives and cronies, led by President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the longest serving leader in the world, in power ever since 1979 when he overthrew his evil uncle, Francisco Macías Nguema. In Equatorial Guinea, oil accounts for 75% of GDP, 98% of exports and 90% of government revenue. It is a classic petrostate. Burgis enjoys telling us that the dictator’s son, Teodorin Obiang, officially receives only a modest salary for the various ministerial posts he’s held, so it must be from some other source that he has been able to buy a $30 million mansion in Malibu, properties in Cape Town and the Avenue Foch in Paris (the avenue of kleptocrats), a fleet of Ferraris and Rolls Royces, a Gulf jetstream, paintings by Renoir and Matisse, and one of Michael Jackson’s jewel-encrusted gloves – while the majority of the population live in poverty or extreme poverty, with a life expectancy of 51 (p.212).

Terrible leadership

Chinua Achebe  fingered the terrible quality of African leadership as the continent’s key problem, as long ago as 1983, 40 years ago:

The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership.’ (p.207)

Contractocracy

Government of contractors, by contractors, for contractors.

Law of the roadblock

Burgis appears to have invented this after being stopped and shaken down at countless roadblocks in numerous African countries. When the economy fails, and in particular when the police don’t get paid, they (or armed citizens) set up roadblocks and fleece drivers. Roadblocks demanding baksheesh are a telltale sign of a political system which has abandoned the wellbeing of the broader population (p.59).

China

The last 20 years have witnessed China’s ever-increasing involvement in Africa because African countries have a high concentration of vital raw resources, and China’s economy has grown at an extraordinary rate. Between the early 1990s and 2010 China’s share of world consumption of refined metals went from 5% to 45% and its oil consumption increased fivefold. In 2012 China’s economy was eight times bigger than it had been in 2002 (p.81).

In 2002 China’s trade with Africa was worth $13 billion a year; in 2012 it was worth $180 billion. Two-thirds of China’s imports from Africa were oil, the rest was other raw materials. As Burgis puts it: ‘The fates of the world’s most populous nation and the planet’s poorest continent have become wedded’ (p.86).

China spends two-thirds of its global outlay on foreign corporate acquisitions in the resources sector. Between 2009 and 2012 Chinese state-owned groups spent $23 billion buying Western companies with African resource assets that stretched from Sierra Leone to South Africa (p.143).

Many of China’s earliest deals were done with the petrostate Angola, where it developed the so-called ‘Angola model’. This is where China makes the country a big loan, generally billions of dollars, at low interest rates ostensibly for the country to develop its infrastructure (water, rods, dams, electricity, roads). These projects are then carried out by Chinese corporations employing Chinese engineers, managers and workers. And the country pays back the ‘loan’ in the form of raw materials, oil etc. Obviously, at every step of the process there is scope for the African country’s elite to cream off tens, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars for themselves. If Western countries, the UN, NGOs etc cry foul, then China and Angola (still nominally run by a Marxist-Leninist party) can dismiss their criticisms with the ad hominem catchcries of imperialism, and colonialism, and racism, and white supremacy etc while the elites of both countries get rich and the people of Angola starve in the streets. (As of 2022, about half of the population of Angola lives in ‘extreme poverty’, while the families who make up the Futungo are among the richest in the world vide Isabel dos Santos.)

Those who defend China’s involvement in Africa say China has built more infrastructure (roads, dams, airports) than the colonial powers did during the entire colonial period. Critics criticise China for doing business with dictators and opaque regimes but, you could argue, ‘the West’ a) did that for years, in fact b) put many of those dictators in place, and c) has been trying to make Africa’s nations more democratic for decades with pitiful success.

So maybe the best policy is just to crack on and build the infrastructure no matter who you deal with. Maybe building the infrastructure which will encourage African nations to develop and industrialise will also, in time, lead to the kind of empowerment and political openness which the western way has so signally failed to create.

The looting machine

As you read through the book you come to realise that Burgis’s account is very much focused on the damage mineral resources, notably gold and uranium, but above everything else, oil, have done to Africa – specifically, how scores of billions of raw materials have been extracted from Africa in a process which has somehow, almost magically, left most of its people worse off than when they gained independence in the 1960s. It’s this that he means when he refers to a looting machine. The machine consists of a number of interlocking past, including:

1. Corrupt rulers

Fairly obvious, and covered in the sections above.

2. How the World Bank and IMF screw Africa

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were set up at the end of the Second World War. The World Bank’s ostensible aim is to promote long-term economic development and poverty reduction – its official name was the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development – while the IMF was set up to ensure the stability of the global economic system.

In reality both institutions have a long and shameful history of forcing neo-liberal, ultra-capitalist solutions on developing countries, policies which have often plunged them into deeper crisis than they were already in, and actively impoverished their populations.

This is because they enforce what has long been called ‘The Washington Consensus’, the belief that, in order to thrive, all economies must follow the same strict, narrow economic and fiscal model, namely: cut taxes, cut government spending, privatise state-owned industries, scrap protectionism, open your markets to international investment and you’ll be rich. These are the strict and always unpopular terms which come attached to any World Bank loan.

Except all too often they don’t work. Put it another way: if they worked as well as the Bank and IMF claim, surely Africa would be rich by now, when it’s clearly not. In practice, Burgis claims that even if you followed Washington Consensus policies to the letter, all they do is balance the books and solve temporary budget crises: they don’t provide any guidance for the long-term development of whole economies. Compare and contrast the policies of the so-called Asian Tigers (the high-growth economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) which thrived in the 1950s and 60s. In complete contradiction to World Bank advice, these countries implemented protectionism to protect their fledgling industrial sectors, and had a high degree of state involvement, funding and planning in all aspects of their economies.

Instead, the two institutions tended to force African nations that needed their help to open their economies to the vulture forces of ‘the global market’ at exactly the time as 50 or so other struggling Third World countries were doing the same thing, all wrecking their welfare states, cutting spending to the bone and offering cut-price resource extraction deals to the world’s multinational corporations, circling like vultures.

Burgis devotes several pages to describing the Extractive Industries Review (EIR), an independent enquiry which the World Bank commissioned into its funding of the extractive industries (i.e. mining) in 2001:

The review was headed by [Indonesian economist Emil] Salim. Salim held consultations with a wide range of stakeholders in 2002 and 2003. The EIR recommendations were published in January 2004 in a final report entitled ‘Striking a Better Balance’. The report concluded that fossil fuel and mining projects do not alleviate poverty and recommended that World Bank involvement with these sectors be phased out by 2008 to be replaced by investment in renewable energy and clean energy. (Wikipedia)

In Burgis’s view, the World Bank carefully considered Salim’s recommendations, spent 9 months coming up with a lengthy reply, and then ignored them all.

It was not just the World Bank that found its influence in Africa’s resource states diminished. The IMF, its sister organisation charged with maintaining the stability of the world financial system, already had a bad reputation in Africa, with reformers and kleptocrats alike, for imposing the strictures of the Washington Consensus, under which African states had become test tubes for the unfettered free-market philosophy that would also beget the subprime crisis and subsequent near-collapse of the western banking system. Emil Salim’s review of the World Bank’s record in the oil and mining industries reported that, in the cases it had studied, ‘the IMF’s approach to the extractive sectors was mainly one that promoted aggressive privatisation of significant mining and hydrocarbon assets for short-term financing of the [government’s budget] deficit. This did nothing to ensure the creation of competition, efficiency gains, development of a domestic private sector, or environmentally and socially sound development strategies for the extractive sectors.’ (p.171)

3. How multinational corporations screw Africa

Arguably this is the core of the entire book, Burgis’s detailed investigations of the various ways multinational corporations screw African countries. I found the details sometimes hard to follow, and hard to see the difference between the legal world of business contacts and paying people finders’ fees or introductory fees (legal) and the illegal world of bribes and payoffs. But it’s much more than that:

a) Opaque deals which are never published, are inaccessible to researchers or citizens, deliberately designed to be inaccessible so as to allow bribery and kickbacks to the ruling elite.

b) The whole world of offshore accounting and tax havens whose sole reason for existing is to allow crooked governments, crooked organisations, crooked multinationals and crooked individuals to hide their financial dealings and loot from the scrutiny of tax officials and enforcement agencies.

c) Crooked governments finding themselves coerced by cartels of, for example, oil extraction companies into agreeing low rents, taxes and percentages i.e. the companies demand much lower rates of tax per barrel or tonne of precious metal, than are paid on other continents (South America or Asia). They can do this because so many African countries hover on the permanent brink of bankruptcy and so are desperate for deals and cash now, even if it means they get ripped off.

d) Cost distribution. This covers a range of tax dodges, and refers to the way transnational corporations are able to move their profits around to different countries so as to minimise their tax liabilities, or to offset profits in one country against losses or costs in another. Clever accounting means huge multinational corporations make it look like they made next to no profit and so pay little or no tax. Starbucks and Amazon have made this strategy common knowledge, but it’s one of the reasons African countries were handing over billions of dollars worth of resources to multinational corporations which made huge profits for their executives and shareholders, while the host nations remained poor and undeveloped.

The empires of colonial Europe and the Cold War superpowers have given way to a new form of domination over the continent that serves as the mine of the world – new empires controlled not by nations but by alliances of unaccountable African rulers governing through shadow states, middle-men who connect them to the global resource economy, and multinational companies from the West and the East that cloak their corruption in corporate secrecy. (p.244)

Given the comprehensive screwing so many African countries have received at the hands of Western companies and institutions, you can see why China’s ask-no-questions, get-on-and-build-it approach presents an attractive alternative.

Some numbers

In 2011 the IMF determined that the discrepancy between the amount Angola ought to have made from its huge oil sales and the amount which actually went into government accounts was $32 billion (p.173).

In 2012 Shell’s revenue was $242 billion. Shell’s chief executive, Peter Voser, was paid $16.5 million (p.194).

In 2014 reforming banker Lamido Sanusi estimated that corruption at Nigeria’s national oil company, NNPC, was robbing the national treasury of $1 billion per month (p.205) – and yet western countries give Nigeria aid, despite the fact that the amounts Nigerian politicians steal from the state purse could match western aid hundreds of times over.

Islamist violence

All this corruption keeps African states backward. It prevents the development of industry and infrastructure and trade. It creates the prevention of jobs and thus ensures that the new generations of young men have few if any prospects. It promotes grotesque inequalities between the rich elite, and the rich in towns and cities, and the poor everywhere but especially in the country. So lots of unemployed men with no future and a burning sense of grievance.

What I’ve learned to call the bayaye. (The word and concept bayaye are explored in ‘The Shadow of The Sun: My African Life’ by Ryszard Kapuściński and ‘The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia’ by James Fergusson).

Fifty years ago they were ripe to join Marxist revolutionary organisations which fought brutal insurgencies to overthrow dictators, western capitalism and install utopian communist societies. Now they join violent Islamist insurgencies which promise to overthrow dictators, western values and install utopian Islamic societies run by Sharia law. Al-Shabab. Boko Haram. Al Qaeda in the Maghreb. Islamic State. According to Sanusi:

‘There’s a clear, direct link between the uneven distribution of resources and the rise in violence.’ (p.206)

‘The region’s idle young men…were ready recruits.’ The young men problem, again, as described in Somalia.

Thought

These kinds of problems are so widespread – Transparency International report that “155 countries have made no significant progress against corruption or have declined since 2012” – that you can’t help wondering whether it is the natural state of affairs. Maybe this is what human beings, and the societies they construct, are just like.

So often the descriptions of modern African shadow states, run by a small cabal who control vast sums of money and run the country by paying off interest groups, tribes, regional leaders and so on – they sound like Dark Age warlords who emerge from wars to control territories, have first dibs on treasure, loot and women, then parcel out the loot to their lieutenants. It sound so primeval, it sounds like the kind of organisation of human groups which has occurred in one form or another throughout history, across all continents.

So maybe it’s the natural state of human societies? And maybe it’s we in the ‘Western’ democracies – we with our obsession with ‘fair’ and ‘democratic’ politics, our reliable civil services, our independent judiciaries, our complex civil societies diffusing centres of power across thousands of scattered nodes, with our ideas of being rewarded for hard work, our concepts of meritocracy – maybe it’s we who are the oddities, the exceptions, the unusual societies which need explaining?

Why give aid?

I don’t really see why we should give aid to any African country given the facts that many of them have enough natural resources to pay for their own development if only their rulers hadn’t a) stolen it or b) signed it over to rapacious extraction companies; and b) those countries which have few resources have already received tens of billions of dollars of aid which corrupt rulers have either i) stolen, ii) spent on huge amounts of arms (vide Ethiopia’s Marxist leaders building up the largest army in Africa while its population died of starvation) iii) wasted on badly conceived megaprojects which turned out to be white elephants / enormous wastes of money.

As the t-shirt slogan says, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

 The argument against violence

Burgis reports from the town of Jos in Nigeria where a terrible massacre of villagers was carried out, men, women and children hacked to pieces or burned alive. The antagonists portrayed it as part of the ongoing ‘war’ between Muslims from the north and Christians from the south. But Burgis talks to a local priest, Ignatius Kaigama, who makes a simple point I don’t remember reading before, which is: God is not such a weakling that he needs you to kill in his name (p.188). You do not need to kill anyone in the name of God or Allah or Brahma. If God wanted people killed, don’t you think he’s able to do that for himself? In other words, anyone who kills ‘in the name of God’ is admitting that their idea of God is  of a weakling who needs human help. Anyone who kills in the name of God, thinks God is weak. In other words, they are the ones who blaspheme and insult God, by implying that he needs human help.

Vagabond In Power by Nneka

Credit

The Looting Machine by Tom Burgis was first published by William Collins in 2015. References are to the 2015 paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on December 4, 2023

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