Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation [Paperback]

Patrick Bond (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1842778110 | ISBN-13: 978-1842778111 | Publication Date: October 14, 2006

Despite the rhetoric, the people of Sub-Saharan Africa are become poorer. From Tony Blair's Africa Commission, the G7 finance ministers' debt relief, the Live 8 concerts, the Make Poverty History campaign and the G8 Gleneagles promises, to the United Nations 2005 summit and the Hong Kong WTO meeting, Africa's gains have been mainly limited to public relations. The central problems remain exploitative debt and financial relationships with the North, phantom aid, unfair trade, distorted investment and the continent's brain/skills drain. Moreover, capitalism in most African countries has witnessed the emergence of excessively powerful ruling elites with incomes derived from financial-parasitical accumulation. Without overstressing the "mistakes" of such elites, this book contextualises Africa's wealth outflow within a stagnant but volatile world economy.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Patrick Bond is professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Development Studies in Durban where he directs the Centre for Civil Society (http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs). He is also visiting professor at York University Department of Political Science. Patrick has authored many books on South Africa and Zimbabwe, including Against Global Apartheid for Zed Books.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Zed Books (October 14, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1842778110
• ISBN-13: 978-1842778111
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #392,710 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Useful study of the pillaging of Africa, January 5, 2007

By 

William Podmore (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation (Paperback)

In 2005 the World Bank admitted that Africa is drained of wealth, through debt, phantom aid, capital flight, brain drain, unfair trade, export of primary products, and distorted investment. From 1980 to 2002, sub-Saharan Africa's debt rose from $61 billon to $206 billion, while it paid $255 billion in interest. Between 1970 and 1996, it also lost $285 billion in capital flight.

In 2000, 80% of Africa's exports were its nations' resources, compared to 31% for all developing countries. If nations stay stuck in the exporting commodities trap, they will not be able to develop industries and become self-reliant.

Bond shows how the EU loots Africa. The European Commission admitted that 70% of the EU's aid-for-trade programme was `support for the private sector'. The EU imposes trade liberalisation and privatisation, stripping Africa of what little industry it has. Trade liberalisation has cost sub-Saharan Africa $272 billion since 1986, because local producers now sell less than they did before trade was liberalised.

In 2005, the G8 wrote off about 1% of Third world debt, $40 billion. Third world debt, $580 billion in 1980, had soared to $2.4 trillion in 2002. Since 1980, the Third World's working classes have paid $4.6 trillion - the equivalent of 50 Marshall Plans - to the First World's capitalists.

Labour migration is another key resource loss. 20,000 skilled workers leave Africa every year. Bond shows that the remittances sent home do not compensate for the loss of the skilled labour. Yet he then writes, "The progressive position on migration has always been to maintain support for the `globalization of people' (while opposing the `globalization of capital') and in the process to oppose border controls and arduous immigration restrictions." This position is self-contradictory, both supporting and opposing `globalization', i.e. capitalism. Further, the evidence shows that unlimited migration weakens the working classes in the countries that lose the skilled labour and in the countries that receive it. But for Bond, the facts are less important than maintaining the traditional `progressive' position.

What is Bond's solution? He approvingly cites a vast array of NGOs, charities, campaigns, initiatives, solidarity groups, web resources, networks, forums and projects - which are splinter groups of activists, all single-issue, all tunnel-vision. These are a mirror image of the ruling class's institutions - IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization, G8 Summits and World Summits (18 between 2001 and 2005). The ultra-left, like the ruling class, focuses on internationalism, turning away from the hard work of developing class struggles for national sovereignty and progress.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good summary of the issues facing Africa today, October 18, 2007

By 

M. A. Krul (London, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation (Paperback)

The total misery and underdevelopment of Africa has, after a period of neglect, regained much attention in Western nations the past few years. Several conferences as well as aid appeals, organized by NGO bureaucracies and pop stars, have been much in the picture for their supposed charitable efforts for the African poor. But to what degree to they actually address what the matter is with Africa?

Patrick Bond, somewhat well-known in radical circles as a political economist, has written "Looting Africa" to summarize how global capital and its comprador elites within Africa have systematically plundered and ruined the continent before and after independence. Even now, the average income of Africans is lower than it was in the 1960s, and if one applies the necessary correctives to GDP tallies, many African nations have been losing per capita income as the result of foreign investment. Moreover, neoliberal programmes of privatization and monetarism have made the poor worse and worse off, without leading to any significant improvement in growth or development. Combine this with the massive theft of African production by local dictators and foreign multinationals, the extreme monoculture production of many African nations, and the unfair trade practices in agriculture on the part of Western nations (in particular the EU), and you have a recipe for disaster.

Bond's analysis is telling and summarizes the issues well, making the book serve as a useful primer for further research into African political economy. He is somewhat vacillating and vague about possible solutions though, fixing some hope on radical NGOs and World Social Forums, but without explaining anything much in detail. It is also a pity that immigration from Africa to elsewhere, in particular Europe, is not addressed in the book. Nevertheless, this is a good popular introduction to the plunder of Africa in the past decades.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Convincing, but politically simplistic, January 11, 2009

By 

S. Sherman "lefteyeonbooks.org" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation (Paperback)

In Looting Africa, Patrick Bond basically updates Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. While Africa is often portrayed in global media as the hapless beneficiary of well intentioned aid and charitable campaigns, Bond emphasizes the many ways wealth is pulled out of the continent--through dividend and debt payments, unequal exchange, brain drains, and such. Aid is often a poisoned chalice that comes with demands that markets be opened to Western economic interests. The same is true of much ballyhooed debt relief. China's recent involvement in Africa is portrayed no more sympathetically. China cuts deals with exploitative rulers and uses Chinese workers on projects like oil refineries. Bond also emphasizes the collaboration of African elites in the neoliberal plunder--South Africa economically exploits its neighbors, while NEPAD locks Africa into neoliberalism. Although he occasionally sympathetically quotes NGO reports, for the most part, he believes that grassroots social movements are the only real hope for change.
It is this final point that I think is the weakest in the book. Although there is certainly some truth to the notion that a politics that seeks to genuinely promote the social good is going to be grounded among the people with nothing to lose in the current system, I think its a strategic mistake to flatten the politics of all other actors into a single exploitative neoliberalism, that, at most 'talks left, walks right' (as he argues was the case with Mandela's opposition to the Iraq war, while the ANC allowed the US to use South Africa in some ways to supprt the war). This is basically a politics of failing to see anything short of a revolutionary rejection of the system as a fraud. I think its short sighted, and will lead to a confused strategy. Bond sees South Africa, along with Brazil and India, as an example of sub-imperialism, but an argument can be made that these sub-powers look both ways--sometimes aligning themselves with the West (which is itself not as unified as Bond believes), sometimes aligning themselves with the interests of poorer countries. They are in-between, politically ambiguous. Bond takes his position to the logical extreme, and even heaps a certain amount of opprobrium on the World Social Forum, since it was started by a social democratic party in Brazil in alignment with intellectuals in Europe. But the WSF has clearly opened space for the networking of the kind of movements he admires worldwide. Notwithstanding his (I think positive) calls to listen to movements, I think there is a certain vanguardist tone to his political stance. Movements from South Africa to the US are often hesitant (far more hesitant than far-left intellectuals) to break completely with pusillanimous ruling liberals for precisely the reasons outlined above--because they allow a little bit of space to advance their projects. Bond might want to listen to this a little, rather than demand the movements immediately achieve a level of militancy he has deemed necessary for their goals.