 Welcome to everybody to CSIS. I'm going to quickly turn over to Tony Carroll, who's a senior associate of the Africa program here at CSIS, but we're really delighted to be hosting Tom Burgess for what we hope will be an informal and interactive chat about his new book, The Looting Machine. Tom, thanks so much. And Tony, thank you for directing Tom our way and for moderating tonight's event. I'll just collect the people from outside, but I think we'll go ahead and get started. Thanks, Jennifer. And welcome to CSIS and to Washington. You've arrived in that brief aperture that we have between winter and summer. So we've certainly watched and it doesn't get much more splendid than this from a standpoint of physical beauty. And here we are in the eve of Earth Day, too. So we're sort of talking about a topic that actually pertains a great deal to the issue of the global environment. Africa's space therein. I want to thank Tom and welcome him for making such a terrific contribution to providing thought leadership on an important topic that we're all mulling over these days and the extent in which Africa's future is tied to the extractive sector and how governance is impacted by extractive industries and the international financial institutions and new actors on the scene. Before I pose a few questions to Tom and we'll leave plenty of room for Q&A because as Tom has suggested, that tends to be the best way in which we can really cover the waterfront on this important topic. But I'd like to start with just a very brief read from the last, the concluding chapter of the book. And if you don't mind, it's a very brief passage and I'll read it. The empires of colonial Europe and the Cold War superpowers have given way to a new form of dominion over the continent that serves as the mind of the world. New empires controlled not by nations but by alliances of unaccountable African rulers governing through shadow states, middlemen who connect them with the global resources economy and multinational companies from east, west and the east that cloak their corruption in corporate secrecy. We prefer not to think of the mothers of eastern Congo, the slum dwellers of Laulanda and the miners of Marengue as we talk on our phones, fill our cars and propose to our lovers. As long as we go on choosing to avert our gaze, the looting machine will endure. The powerful words, powerful conclusion to a powerful book. I'd like to maybe start on, to discuss what you and I, what drew you and I together five or six years ago as you were reporting from Lagos and that is the issue of the collapse of the Nigerian textile industry. For those of you who don't know or follow the history of the Nigerian textile industry, at its peak the Nigerian textile industry in the late 70s employed about 300,000 people. The product that was most distinctive in Nigerian's production was this wonderful wax cloth that the African women adorn themselves throughout West Africa and was not only an industrial complex and vertical and linkages to the agro sector and cotton production and ginning and processing and dying. But it was also emblematic of the wonderful culture that Africa had because many of these designs were drawn from the rich traditions of Nigeria. They were often worn in symbolic ways to attend weddings and funerals and other family events and that industry of course is a shadow of what it once was. But it is an interesting lesson for how this industry has collapsed both from sort of external structural problems in the Nigerian economy but also from internal political problems which I think Tom documents really in maybe the first or second chapter of your book. So why don't you draw a little bit, can we draw you a little bit more about that story? You were reporting at that time from Lagos and give us a little bit of indication, a little bit of the color of that story. But thanks, Tanya, thanks very much everyone for coming along. That story of Nigerian textile started for me when I'd only been in Nigeria for about a week and my editor sent me up to Kaduna, we were trying to do a special on the country and I had literally no idea what I was doing. But I turned up in Kaduna, was introduced through a couple of friends to various people, met one Muhammadi Bahari who was made his views known and started to go around some of the churches it was actually and the sort of dilapidated old schools where a lot of these redundant textile workers were hanging out. It was a Sunday and they showed me the old, the big factories in the middle of Kaduna by the river which were completely shuttered. There was one security guard on the inside and just lizards going in and out of the gates. And as you say, about 300,000 people not just in Kaduna but across northern Nigeria would have been employed at the peak of the industry and then many more indirectly in cotton farming and the rest of it. And pretty quickly I started to realize that the collapse of the textile industry is emblematic of the collapse of northern Nigeria's economy and the creation of one of this enormous zone of poverty from what was a couple of decades ago a zone of relative prosperity. And actually the first thread I followed, pardon the pun, is wasn't to oil and the distortions. It was that these redundant workers who were standing around in an old school explaining to me how they'd lost their jobs. I said to them, so why has this happened? What's the root of this? And they, people shuffled and looked around and they just said, mangal. And I didn't know who this man was at the time, but over the years that followed and in the book, I've tried to piece together the story of this guy, Alhaji Dahuru Mangal, who is a big political donor. He funded Umar Ayyua's governorship campaigns and then presidential campaign. He's a big guy in the PDP, until recently the ruling party. And he was also, he ran the hard pilgrimages, he ran an airline, and he was also behind all of this, one of the preeminent smugglers of northern Nigeria. He would truck in basically anything that anybody wanted. Textile imports are illegal and yet they completely dominate the market. They have, I think, about 90% market share compared to the now withered local industry. So I tried to piece together Mangal's story, but what also became clear was that he doesn't operate, he doesn't exist in a vacuum. He wasn't able to crush the Nigerian textile industry single-handedly. He needed Chinese counterfeiters, he needed a porous border, but what he needed above all was the weakness of the domestic industry to be able to flourish. And that came about through the distortions caused by Nigeria's booming oil production through the 80s and 90s to start to, this process known as Dutch disease, first identified in the Netherlands in the 50s when they struck gas, of it primarily happens through the currency, I'm sure lots of people know this, the currency becomes overvalued, exports become uncompetitive, and at the same time you get this insidious process in politics when government starts to become far more reliant on rent income from oil and other natural resources than they do on taxing the people and winning the consent of the people to rule, that public spending starts to shift away from infrastructure, roads, a functioning electricity system, the education system, and into what North Sarawiva calls a contractocracy, pouring that rent money out to win allegiance through patronage, and spending priorities that benefit the ruling elite, so military spending typically goes up enormously, and this distortion in the exchange rate, the collapse of infrastructure did for, or certainly started to cause enormous problems for, this once flourishing Nigerian textile industry, so that's ultimately what I was able to piece together and the stories that others have told, but the fascinating thing for me, as a final point, is the extent to which, and I think often we miss this, the extent to which this kind of curse of natural resources is felt far from the oil slick creek to the delta or eastern Congo with its mines, it permeates through the entire state of the entire economy, so much so that the northern Nigeria's felt the curse of oil arguably as much as the delta in some ways, indeed. Let's talk a little bit about some of these networks and how they emerge in the shadows of these business dealings, and one remarkable theme or thread that runs through this book is the involvement of the Queensway Group. They seem to be the universal donor to all the deals in which you talk about in your book, and I'd like us to hear a little bit more about Sampa, a lot about the Queensway Group, which of course isn't their actual name, but it's a name that was drawn based on their Hong Kong address, and the fact that many companies sort of resided there in the end you talk about, or not resided there. But I'd like to talk a little bit about how a person like Sampa is able to ingratiate himself in so many different areas and ways. It's really quite astounding. It is, and the person who came up with the name is here. Actually, it should be acknowledged, J.R. Maley, he's done more than anyone to piece together what the Queensway Group is and how it works, and there's more coming from J.R. soon for which we're greatly looking forward. Well, and we'll have back for another session. So what is Sam and how is he able to operate? Just a moment of background. He, as best we understand it, he was born either in Hong Kong or on the Chinese mainland and moved to Hong Kong as a young man. Gradually develops, seemingly, the way I understand it is a formal relationship with the Chinese intelligence services, but there also seems to be informal exchange of information. And then he seems to have been involved in arms dealing in Africa and elsewhere, in intelligence work in Cambodia, and in cultivating links between arms of the Chinese security and intelligence services and some of the African liberation movements as they were preparing to take power or taking power. And then, as like many spooks before him, he switched from espionage into business. There's a long line, obviously, of British special forces people hopping into the mining game in Africa instead. And Sam does this at exactly the time that Jiang Jiumin decides to go forth into the world and sends out Chinese state-owned companies and entrepreneurs in search of natural resources and markets all over the world, but enormously so in Africa. And Sam is able to make himself, largely by sheer caprice, but partly by being in the right place at the right time. He's able to make himself someone who has, borrowed JR's term, always the right Rolodex. He's able to exaggerate his connections, to some extent, both in Africa and China, but he's able to forge some of the parallel deals that go behind or underneath this big state-to-state relationship between Beijing and various African countries. And he starts in Angola where, and this is where the Queensway Group is born. It's a long story, I encourage you to read it in the book. But in a nutshell, Sam, with Manuel Vicente, Angola's Mr. Oil, is able to enter near a deal whereby a company is created called China Sonongol, which is Sam and his little group of allies registered at 88 Queensway in Hong Kong. And Sonongol, the kind of the engine of the shadow state, the controls, Angola controls its oil wealth. That company ends up with various stakes in some enormous oil fields. And Sam goes on to Zimbabwe, to cut similar deals involving Mugabe's secret police and the diamond trade. He turns up when Daddus sees his power in Guinea. I believe we have a daughter of the Republic of Guinea here who will be chipping in, I hope. I know she will, she's already queued. And he's popped up in all manner of places. And there are two, I think there's two points to make. One is he operates in, he deals with, and this is a term I kept hearing on my travels and postings, he deals with shadow states or parallel governments. He deals with the power that resides behind the formal institutions of state and which develops again and again when you have a country run on rent, on resource rent. Angola is in Zimbabwe, Guinea under the junta. They've even got a foot into Nigeria and various other places beyond Africa now, increasingly. That's one point. The other is that these are not the old, they're not the old networks. They're very much creatures of, Sam I think is very much a creature of globalization. These are business interests and private interests that harness state institutions but don't necessarily represent them. So if you were to look at it in a sort of cartoonish way, you could see Sam as, China and China is a monolithic thing coming in doing business with Africa and seeing Africa as a monolithic thing. But these are enormous syndicates that stretch crucially through some of the pockets of the globalized economy where it's easiest to engage in corporate subterfuge, the BVIs, Cayman Islands, places like that. It also involves, it equally involves business partners from east and west. So Sam will bring in some of the biggest Chinese companies and help them win contracts and advance his own private interest in that way. But the Queensway Group's biggest asset, this stake in one of the big offshore oil fields. And that girl is run by BP. In Guinea they have an off-take agreement with Glencore and they own assets ranging from real estate in Singapore to the J.P. Morgan building opposite the New York Stock Exchange. And that's one of, and it just gets more and more bizarre. I mean, some of this stuff you couldn't make up. So a Queensway asset was doubled as the Gotham City Stock Exchange in the last Batman film. I mean, it does start to get fairly bizarre some of this stuff. Well, I urge you to read the book because it's the thread that runs through it all. Is Sam, yeah. Is Sam. Of course, taking a page from Tiny Rowland and perhaps Mark Rich and others who wore those or used those same strategies to enrich themselves in two generations before. For sure. And oddly enough, Mark Rich, as I mentioned, but Glencore is and of course Tiny Rowland still is I guess the founder of Laundman going back many years. That's a great comparison, yeah. So I think they knew how to play this game well before. Let's talk a little bit about lost potential. And I'd like to draw you a little bit on the Simandu project, which is a project Tiki and I were talking about earlier. I first went to Guinea in the 1980s and they were talking about the promise of Simandu back then. And we're still talking about the promise of Simandu and it's still a very complicated history. Talk a little bit about why the country of Guinea has not been able to benefit from what is perhaps the largest undeveloped iron ore project in the world. Well, yeah, I mean, the chapter on the book about this is called, is borrows that old Swahili saying of when the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled. I think that is the, that's what has happened. There's, I'll just make two quick points on that really. Seating the floor. One would be that, again, Simandu's been just tied up in layers of, in some cases seemingly corruption and in some cases of the enormous mismatch between multinationals and results rich but relatively poor African country and the extent to which the strategy of the former can so easily trump the strategy of the latter. Rio Tinto sat on that for a long time. They're still sitting on it. They are ostensibly moving towards bringing Simandu into production but we've seen deadlines before Zoom passed. The latest one has just slipped again. Rio Tinto control, used to control the whole thing. Now control half of it, the southern half, the northern half was taken off them and given to Steinmetz's company. Thanks to Steinmetz. BSG Resources, to which Steinmetz is formally only an advisor but he's also, it says in court papers ultimately that the main financial beneficiary again through layers of complex corporate ownership. And the, it's another long story but basically it was taken a few months ago that Steinmetz's rights, BSGR's rights were canceled on the grounds that the inquiry concluded that bribes were paid and offered to the former dictator's wife to secure those rights. And it's now tied up in I think a seven or eight way legal battle involving a criminal case in Switzerland, a criminal case in the US, civil cases on three, possibly four continents. And the prospect of something like that emerging into production is remote and I'll just make two points about that. One is the mismatch between, and it was Mahmood Thiam who put this to me I think, who was the, he was a minister about whom people have asked questions but he was the minister under the junta of 2009 former UVS banker. He has his critics and he has people accusing of all sorts of things but he put it fairly reasonably when he said within when the stock price of Rio Tinto or whoever else, Simando is reflected. It sits nicely in their equity as a future project regardless of how sincere they are about developing it. But obviously there's no such benefit for Guinea but this is also one of the situations where you have this kind of catch-22 economics. The IMF and others have examined the possibility of if Simando went up to full production the amount of money that would flow into the treasury would be massively destabilizing. And this is the problem. The prize that people look for is an enormous rush of rent money and yet you look around all of Guinea's neighbors and an enormous rush of rent money has been catastrophically damaging. So just to finish, I mean that the analogy sometimes found useful and I thought I thought I'd made this up myself but it turns out that it was in Steve Cole's book about Exxon first. But I'm gonna claim it myself anyway. If I said to you Tony, look I know you've had a hard time and I know you've lost your job and there's a hole in the roof, lots of mouths to feed. I have a lottery ticket for you which is worth a million dollars. I can pretty much guarantee you based on what we know happens to lottery winners that you'll end up in rehab, you'll buy a fast car and you'll crash it, you'll get divorced, everything will go wrong. And then you'll be broke. But you want it anyway, don't you? And everyone of course takes a lottery ticket and that is the equivalent of bringing something, unless you're lucky, the lesson of the history of African resource states is by almost exclusively I would say that when you have that rush of rent money it causes far more harm than good. Well it's a good segue to my next question or sort of maybe a series of questions is on the issue of okay, we've learned a lot of bad lessons but there are some lessons that have been examples of where it's worked well. I think Chile has done well with its natural resources Botswana certainly has done well, Namibia has done well. And so there are examples of countries that have done better and perhaps because of the peculiar institutional, ethnic or historical context of each of these countries. And I think the major actors have changed. I think the Shell of 75 years ago is a different organization than it is now. I think new actors such as Cosmos and maybe Tullo are perhaps taking a different look at how they're integrating their activities into a more holistic or helpful way in to avoid some of these pitfalls and resource curse manifestations that we've seen. You know the question is what does this pertain in the future? Do you think any of these initiatives like EITI, the Kimberly process which you discuss in your book make a difference? Do you think that the industry is changing? Do you think these relationships with the resource rich countries are evolving to a new chapter? Lots of pressures on localization, value addition, building global value chains, integrating infrastructure to benefit larger communities or groups of people. What is changing? I mean the fact is that Africa has resources. The world now, East and West need those resources. How can we avoid some of the lessons or pain from the past and are there any institutional actors such as EITI and the Kimberly process that might make this process better? So just nine questions. Sorry, yep. I just make a couple of points. One is I'm so slightly wary of Chile, Botswana and Namibia. These are also the countries at the top of the genetic coefficient. They're some of the most unequal countries in the world but yes much more peaceful for one thing than elsewhere. On the things like EITI and the Kimberly process, I think they have some value. I think there's a danger with something like the EITI that its backers become so keen for it to be all encompassing that the bar to entry sinks a lot. I mean there was that big test when they threw out Equatorial Guinea. I mean the very idea that Equatorial Guinea at the moment could have a stamp of legitimacy from an international organization seems bizarre to me. The Kimberly process similarly has achieved a lot but I think took a big blow when they accredited Zimbabwean diamonds. I mean Zimbabwean diamonds flow onto the market. You can buy a Zimbabwean diamond in Antwerp. You can probably buy one in New York and at the same time you can go to Marenga as I did and you can sit and you can hear people tell you how their brothers are being beaten to death in effectively a torture chamber run by the military. Diamond base. The diamond base, yeah, a terrifying place. So I think possibly what's required is the one thing I should always say is that I've never think I'm in any position to tell 48 companies what to do or even to begin to do a thing like that but I have tried to listen out to some of what I think are some of the most persuasive ideas and I think one was repeatedly raised by Lamedo Sanusi when he was the central bank governor in Nigeria. Widely held to be a very impressive man, now the Amir of Karno of course and the man who exposed the missing billions in Nigeria. He often talks about something that's kind of gone out of fashion and has lots of critics but he basically looks at the Asian Tigers and he sees that they used as European countries did 200, 300 years ago, they protected their nascent industries and they used, as South Africa I think is trying to do, they used a beneficiation strategy. You just lock those minerals up within your country and you build up the value chain rather as Botswana has done with the... With the value addition and the cutting and sorting and polishing that they have now in countries. I think that's way because I think for all these voluntary initiatives fundamentally what needs to happen is that to quote a guy who I mentioned in the book he used to work with Tiny Rowland, an extraordinarily affable Nigerian called Richard Accarelli. I mean one late night I asked him what is the future of Africa and he said, face fell and he said Africa will be a mine and Africans will be the drones of the world. And this is not some sort of post-colonial casual racist, this is a Nigerian and that's a terrifying prospect for him and for a great many other people. So the way to break that surely is to move, broaden out these economies away from these enclaves of concentrated political and economic power into things like textile manufacturing, into things like cutting and polishing in Botswana or making catalytic converters out of platinum in Dan and Fort Elizabeth. And the other thing is to enforce the law. I mean there are very strong anti-corruption laws in the US, they're enforced pretty vigorously. There are new ones in the UK. There are very strong anti-corruption laws in Nigeria. There are new, there are in places like Tanzania which is obviously going to be crucial to watch a place that has built some strong institutions and now has the test of oil and gas come. There are initiatives there such as ones where you have to demonstrate rather than a prosecutor necessarily having to make the case that they can follow a money trail and can demonstrate that you've looted your ministry or taken a kickback, you would have to account for your lifestyle effectively. So if there was an enormous and obvious difference between your lifestyle and your income, you would have to demonstrate where that extra we call the means test. Yeah, means test, but effectively, but kind of in reverse, right? So a means test on wealth rather than poverty. So initiatives like that I think are interesting. And the one, the last one I'd mentioned is Gathering Steam is this campaign. It's made it into the Obama Administration has mentioned it, a kind of soft version. It's been mentioned to the G7. Global Witness and some other activist groups are getting behind it and it's in the Labour manifesto in the UK, the stronger version of it. Is this idea of having a global registry of beneficial ownership, of true ownership of companies, of offshore companies effectively because there are already these registries of onshore companies. That for me would be an enormous change and would block off an awful lot of the plumbing of the Lutti machines through these secretive vehicles that again and again and again you see these corrupt schemes function. Well, we have a great audience here. So I'd like to take the remaining 25 minutes of our time to open it up for questions from the floor. I'd like you to please identify yourselves and make your comments and statements reasonably short. So let's open it up. Tiggy, are you ready or you want to wait? I'm still reading. All right, she's still reading. So questions? Okay, Philip, we'll start with Philip. Thank you. I can't read the whole thing. Philip, we got a microphone. We're being touched. I was, I read. And welcome back. Thank you. Michaela Rong's review in the New York Times said that this is a challenge to the sort of notion of Africa rising. They've got these two sort of like versions of the African economy. You've got this, which is basically bad guys making deals with the kleptocrats and then a huge mass of poor people. And then my kind of question is really where are the Africans in your book? And the reason why I ask that question is because if we were to say what's a political structure, let's understand the political structure of Africa, that we went to Somalia and people would think, my God, this is awful. And I mean, I know Steinmetz, I know Goethe, I know all of these guys. You've strung together some really awful characters who are very destructive overall in Africa. But I want to know, would you agree with Michaela's observation that this book challenges the notion that there's a new development phase underway in Africa? And there's two reasons why I say that just very quickly if you just give me the time. I think first of all, because Africa is not just a resource economy, or the Africa rising, where you put it aside, call it something else. That notion is really moving beyond resources, that we are seeing a great diversification in African economies, even in Nigeria, where oil is down to 14% of GDP. So the real kind of notion is one where you actually move beyond the resource curve. And the second to the other thing is there's a huge demographic change in Africa where people are moving out of absolute poverty, large numbers of people, and they're becoming active players, they're consumers, they're people that are of interest. So Africa is not just this kind of wasteland of poverty. There are people who are politically making a change. There are people who are of interest to investors, not only because the investors want to come and dig stuff out of the ground and drill for oil. So it comes back to that original question. Do you see this as an alternative narrative, or can you incorporate that alternative view into what you're writing? And you thought my questions were complicated. I was Philip Van Nieker, former editor of the Mellon Guardian in South Africa, and one of the more experienced and esteemed commentators on Africa for many, many years. For sure, for sure. Yes, I think it is not so much intended as a challenge to the Africa rising argument, but it's turned out like that. I was personally always quite suspicious of that Africa rising argument, partly because it does something that I'm probably guilty of, although I tried to avoid it of speaking as Africa as if it was one big thing. And secondly, because I thought some of the excitement was overdone. Yes, there does seem to be a growing middle class, but it's extremely fragile, I always thought. And I think that a big test comes now with a big fall in the commodity prices, the extent to which that African rising narrative was driven by the commodity boom. I don't think I'm in a better position to call how that will play out, but it'd be interesting to see what happens. On Africa rising being a sort of alternative, on the diversification of economies that we've seen being an alternative to the resource curse, I agree to some extent that certainly in places like Nigeria, places like Lagos that are sort of managing to disconnect themselves in some ways from that rentier economy. And in other pockets of largely coastal Africa, there is that development. But I think, however much we would like those of us who wish Africa as well as we possibly can, would like to see this as a uniform development, much of the interior Africa where I spent a lot of time is not rising. It's still driven with warfare and extremely hard living conditions. And on the diversification point, the crucial thing for me, the most insidious part, was not too much the share of resources in GDP, but the share of resources in government income. And that doesn't seem to be shifting that much. So in Nigeria, it's still kind of 70% government income from oil and gas, and about 4% from direct taxation. And in Sudan, the figures like South Sudan, it's 98% similarly high rate in Angola. That, for me, was more troubling, really, because it breaks that basic contract between rulers and rule. It means that in many ways, the ruling elite of whatever form it takes doesn't need to appeal for popular consent to rule because it's not funded by the people. I mean, I don't know if you wanted to come back again. I mean, I think it's a strong point. Other questions, please. Later, OK. He's going to corner you on the way out. No, please, please. Yeah, I don't present have answers. Good afternoon. My name is Rosemary Segero. I'm a president of an unprofit organization called Hope for Tomorrow. We focus on conflicts and violence prevention. You talk about looting machines. Looting machines have cost a lot of havoc, not only looting, but violence and conflict in Africa. Women have died, children have died, looking for those minerals, oil, and everything. Now that you have written this book, what do you think you can make a difference of your book and part of what you are selling this book should go back to those countries and help those women and children to make a difference so that the looters can know that this man really wrote a book of truth. Now that you've written the book, so how do you make that change? Or you will be part of the looter again. So, thank you. First of all, I'd like to say there's a slightly mistaken premise at the start of the center of your point up there, which is the idea that the book's going to make any money. But, yeah, personally, I do try and do some charitable stuff. I'm not going to get into it here, but we can talk about it after this. We have a question down here, and let's take a couple. Let's do here, here, there, and then we'll come back for one quick last round. Deidre, I got you, and I'm going to give Tiggy at least one more chance to ask a question. Thank you. I'm Jack Balkins. I benefited from a first-run discussion of this book at the Columbia University Conference in Africa last Saturday, where I met Tom. Being South African, of course, but I have worked with the World Bank for 40 years, so I've lived recently in Cape Town and grew up in Johannesburg, and I have some knowledge of the South African economy. And the question that has struck my mind is South African mining companies have been through the same world, down shocks, and the collapse of commodity prices. Yet some of the companies don't seem to have been subject to state capture, either by, say, the military wing of the ANC when it came to power or by Chinese investment. It just doesn't seem that way. They've got many other problems in South Africa, but not the same as what you describe in your book. Am I deluding myself on that? And if I'm right, or partly right, it could be attributed that there's better corporate law and transparency there, and internationally-owned companies that are quoted on the international stock exchanges, such as Angler Gold, Ashanti, and these big companies that they've got social problems, but they don't seem to have the state capture rental issue that you describe so eloquently in the book. Yeah. Take that and bring it back to the next one. But go ahead. Do you want to take it? No, go ahead. Go ahead, answer. I mean, just quickly, there isn't a nor great deal of South Africa in the book, but I would say, obviously, there was subject to state capture under apartheid. Right, right, right. And I mean, which is obviously the biggest sweep of the bigger period I'm trying to cover in modern South African history in the book, and the going back through the numbers, the extent to which the international gold market was the bankroller of apartheid, it's just astounding if you go back through the numbers. I think it was the late, late 70s, early 80s, when South Africa was producing two-thirds of world gold production, and that's what kept apartheid afloat. And there were obviously there were tensions between the kind of African's political side and the more English-speaking mining execs generally, but they made their tacit arrangement that one would support the other. So the question is, are South African companies, big South African mining companies today, subject to less state capture? Broadly so, yeah, I think the JSEs are pretty strong institution. South Africa is a broader economy. My one point would be this, the sort of inequality indicators haven't really changed, have they, since 1994? For me, part of that is a model that's obviously next to impossible to, in such a short period of time, to make redress on the scale that's required. But part of the problem, I think, especially in the early stage of black economic empowerment, was just basically transferring sources of rent. So keeping a pyramid that was shaped by as a resource economy, even though it is now broader, and just changing the color of some of the bricks at the top, rather than trying to widen out the pyramid. It's a good book to read on that topic is Steve Lewis's The Economics of Apartheid. And the reason that Botswana left the RAND monetary union in 1976 was in part because they felt that the diamond sales were in effect accruing to the benefit of the Reserve Bank of South Africa. And so Steve Lewis's recommendation to Quet-Missiri at that time, who was the Minister of Finance, was let's exit the RAND monetary union. And that way we won't be subsidizing Apartheid. And in a way, Botswana did that and did that successfully. We got a question back there and then we'll come over to Jennifer and then Tiggy. Hi, Winslow Robertson, Cowries and Rice, China, Africa, consulting stuff. I'm really curious about the prospects of dismantling the looting machine. And I track Chinese finance in Africa and I don't particularly blame Chinese money in Africa doing what any other foreign country does in Africa. But I want to know what the prospects are for the looting machine to stop the incentive structures that might change and whether you have a brilliant 10-point plan to stop it in the concluding chapter of your book. My brilliant 10-point plan, I'll read it to you now. No, I have no such thing. I think we touched on some of it earlier. I think there are things that the, I think it was more in the UK actually when I was doing events like this, the number of people who would steer the conversation back to aid and the extent to which in the British central and right-wing press aid dominates the discussion of Africa. I wonder whether an interesting thing would be to switch more to the scale of wealth that is filched from Africa and bleeds out either through straight up corruptions or through trans-firmist pricing or you could argue just through raw exports as opposed to more value addition manufacturing within the continent, the big resource producers. I think a shift in the debate like that would be helpful. I think sometimes the debate, especially I think you find it in Europe, is obsessed with aid, which is a fraction of the sums we're talking about and often terribly paternalistic and neocolonial. It seems to me often that the debate is, it's the equivalent of headbutting someone, standing on their neck and then saying, I'll call you an ambulance. I mean, the structures of the looting machine are overwhelmingly, the plumbing is overwhelmingly outside Africa and it falls under the regulatory rate, falls beyond the regulatory power of African institutions. And the other thing, yeah, the beneficial ownership thing, I think would be one concrete step, but no, I don't have some big solution. But surely that's for people like you to work out. Jennifer? Crook with CSIS and thanks for the talk. It was actually following on that. The question of the G7 initiative on tax transparency and beneficial ownership and Kofi Annan had his, the Africa Progress Panel, very good report a couple of years ago, equity and extractives. Equity and extractives, wasn't it, yeah. But I just wonder what kind of traction is that initiative getting and what is the venue in which to push into, to push that and what kind of traction is it getting in Africa? Kind of global or regional or standards for beneficial ownership. What will get that done kind of thing? Where is the place to push on that? One answer to that is to say, read JL's report when it comes out soon. Two, I'm not sure about traction in Africa about that. I mean, it's not really an African problem, right? Well, you do, yes. I think Thabo and Becky's report on trade mispricing is linked into that because it's the same vehicles that are used for tax dodges. I think, though, that also people, and this is all just anecdotal really from me on this stuff for now, but a lot of people in the various talks along the road have pointed to that recent New York Times piece called The Towers of Secrecy, all about real estate development in Manhattan and how I think there's something like 90% of new construction in Manhattan is owned by offshore companies. And I suspect that people will start to twig to this kind of stuff much more if they can combine a sense of empathy with far-off countries that are being looted with the fact that their children can't afford to buy a house because a lot of looted Russian money or a junior money or whatever it may be is massively inflating the real estate market. They might own Rockefeller Center, but they can't get a house, right? Yeah, right, yeah. I think that's where maybe some of it will come from. A woman I spoke to earlier at Global Winners, they're doing some work to try to raise the profile of it. The UK lecture, if it goes labors where, would be interesting to see how that plays out. I think the main division is between those who say we must have a registry, it must be global, and it must be public. And those who say, yeah, well, we'll try and have a registry country by country, but it'll be private, which rather defeats. The point of it would be available to kind of law enforcement agencies and maybe one or two others. But it has to be the first option, surely, to stand on each hand. We're gonna have two more questions. Okay, JR, you wanna make a comment on that? Yeah, go ahead. And then I'm gonna do Deirdre and I'm gonna leave the last word to my good friend, Tiggy. Sure, yeah, first, just a compliment to the book, Tom. I just finished it. And you know, in addition to- Can you tell us who you are, JR? JR Maley, Africa Center for Strategic Studies. You know, in addition to kind of mapping out the elite-level networks and the John Le Carré-type storylines, you know, what I was struck by was the ability for me to convey the sort of on the ground level storyline. The particular passage I'm thinking of is the It's Forbidden to Piss in the Park chapter where you discuss stopping to relieve yourself on the side of the road and turn that into an eloquent discussion of how patriotic network work. You know, and what struck me was, you know, getting down to the ground level. If you were a reformer, if you were someone in civil society, if you were, you know, someone who really wanted to make a difference in a resource-rich African country like Engel or like Eastern Congo. You know, we talk about how the plumbing is outside of the continent. What would you do if you were in one of those countries and you wanted to make a difference? I mean, the trial of Raphael Marx de Marais is this week. I mean, he's one of the most renowned anti-corruption campaigners on the continent. And he's facing something like 16 libel charges. You know, so what pathways are there for folks in Africa, in resource-rich states, to sort of make a difference? And where, you know, where can people start if they want to get, move the needle a little bit? Thanks. Thanks, man. Do you have anything to take? Why don't we take a couple? Deirdre, you go next, and then I'll leave the last one for Tiggy. Tom, my name is Deirdre Lupin, and I've been a correspondent of Tom's for quite a long time on Nigeria and Africa in general. And it's such a pleasure to see him today. Absolutely, yeah, I'm a wise social council. Yeah, lovely. I must confess I haven't read the book yet, but I very proudly own now an autographed copy, so I'm delighted. My question is a very hard and naive question all at the same time. In your investigations of Nigeria, have you come to any conclusions about why no one will tackle or is willing and able to tackle the massive oral theft in the Niger Delta? Oh, okay. Can we take one more watch? I'm looking out for that if I'm gonna take that. Tiggy, I'm afraid we're gonna have to see him later. Go ahead, Tiggy. Yeah, okay. Did it take you two hours to get here? Well, I hope it doesn't take you two hours to go home. All right, I'll give you a last word, but it's gonna have to be short, okay? For me, it would be above a comment and a question. So I will say. Tiggy, when you tell us who you are. My name is Tiggy Kamara. I am the founder and CEO of Tiggy Mining Group. So this book actually hits right back home regarding the mining sector in Guinea. So the cement case has had good and bad impact on the mining sector in Guinea. Good one that the government has finally taken steps about trying to face people that they think are not doing things the right way. People that are looting, like you said, Africa or our economy in a certain way. The review of past contracts. Exactly, but the other part is it's not just putting it out there. It's not just attacking one particular company because I'm sure there are many other companies in Africa, specifically in Guinea that have acquired licenses, major companies or major licenses, but not doing nothing. Just sitting on there and then making money. But the impact that it has, the negative impact for someone like me in the junior mining company, it has made it very, very difficult for us, for example, to find the right type of partners because all of a sudden they think, oh, the government now is not really, they're not protecting interest. They have big companies like Valais and BHP and so forth, all of a sudden now they could take their licenses so what will they do to us little investors? So the most important thing was to find the way to sending out the message. And I think it was the way the message was sent that's now right because if we go a little bit deeper somewhere they will say, this was not only about looting Guinea's economy. Somewhere they were saying that it was something that was between Benny Steinmeister and Mr. Soros or whoever his name is. So it was something, it was like a personal vendetta and then poor Guinea is caught in the middle of it. And with that, all the different companies that really want to develop the economy. So having done so many research, what type of advice will you give African government in about how now to remedy to this kind of a looting problem? What can it be done? Nick, we'll let you go ahead with those. Maybe in reverse order. Yeah, so obviously the BSGR's approach from the beginning when it realized it was under review has been to try to push a completely alternative narrative which is a conspiracy between Alphacondae, George Soros, assorted to other people. For which from what I've seen, I don't believe it's the case. There doesn't seem to have been a significant body of evidence to show that that is what really happened. What appears to have happened, I think is what you're arguing is that they, Condae, to a greater or lesser extent, made a genuine attempt to have an independent or at least an arms length review of past mining contracts, exactly the kind of thing that any sort of policy advisor I think would advise in that situation when you've had half a century dictatorship. There were flaws in how it was done, it seems, and lots of critics, but they seem to have made a pretty good effort of it, especially when you compare it to something like the Congolese mining review, which did seem to be an exercise in asset snatching. So I think it's a tricky one for me to comment on because we've done so much reporting on it, but we try to keep that balance all the way through. But I think a lot of people would say that Condae deserves some credit for that process, whatever other criticisms there may be of the way he's ruled. But it just shows that, I completely agree, it just shows the terrible bind that if you hadn't done anything like that, it would have been encouraging impunity and da-da-da-da-da, and if you go ahead with something like that, you're an asset snatcher and what have you. It's, yeah, I'm not sure they're, that's just an injustice. I'm not entirely sure, I don't know if you have an idea, but I'm not entirely sure how that would be, how better to address that. They had their PR people, they tried to get their message across, they had some pretty heavy-weight advisers trying to help them. I think, by and large, the message has got across that certainly compared to the junta that went immediately before, things are better in Guinea, but it has been ensnared in this big legal battle. Yeah, yeah. Well, in an environment of declining commodity prices too, so it's like... Annibola. Yeah, Annibola. Some pretty unlucky cards as well without that, which are beyond anyone's control. Well, I think the two of you can continue this discussion. Shall I just jump on the other two? Duda and JR's pieces, and I think, unfortunately, we're gonna have to clear the room. This, I think this comes back to... Something was mentioned earlier about where are the Africans in this book. There are quite a lot of them, but I think the question was more to do with where are the kind of the Africans who aren't the finance minister, right? Or that the people you might bump into are the roadblock in Eastern Congo. And that's something I did try to grapple with of what it's like to live under this kind of... A sort of political economy that's distorted by rent. And it's... Again and again, you could see this tension almost physically in people, especially when I was living in Lagos or Dan and the Niger Delta of people who would like that guy on that roadblock with his AK-47, who would clearly be aware that their actions, their imposition, in that case of a kind of basically bogus roadblock to tax a little piece of the road, were part of a broader malaise in someone like Congo or the Delta that is perpetuating the curse for their children ultimately. But you're faced with this terrible dilemma of do you make your peace with the system or stay locked outside and stay locked outside the one kind of... Take your point, not across Africa, but in many of these resource areas, with the one real pocket of wealth. For on what to do, hip-hop, I would say. So, Raphael, you mentioned in Angola, he's written about ex-prosupal mental and other rappers in Angola, this kind of vanguard of resistance. There are some LD and other very interesting Nigerian rappers and musicians who are starting to articulate in a fascinating way at least the anger with the kind of oil trap that they found themselves stuck in. There's links between the uprising in the coup basically in Burkina Faso and hip-hop and Sierra Leone and the anti-corruption movement in Senegal and the protection of the democratic process. So I would say, if you want to make a difference, learn to rap. And I think the Nigerians invented that approach a few years ago, didn't they? Finally, well, and then it works, it works here, huh? And why is oil still stolen in the Niger Delta? Because you keep running the racket, actually. Because in a sentence, I think the worrying thing is that there's weirdly an alignment of interests. It suits the, I'm not sure it's necessarily always conscious, but it suits the interests of the multinationals operate and increasingly the local Nigerian companies operating on Chor and the Delta for some chunk of our oil to be stolen. It's an informal version for me of like a formal local content policy. Everybody says that they're losing, but actually there's key interests, formal, informal, violent, nonviolent art. Their interests are aligned. Look, there's a lot of things in this book that we haven't reached, including the personal toll that this took on your own life and how you had to recover from an extraordinarily intense period of time. But I'd like to welcome you back another time. Wish you much success, continued success with this book. I know that you're a young man onto great things and hope that we'll cross pass again. So will you join me in giving Tom a round of applause? Thank you. Thank you very much.