The Looting Machine: Warlords, Tycoons, Smugglers and the Systematic Theft of Africa’s Wealth

The slope grew steeper. The earth underfoot gave way like a sand dune. Finally a peak of jagged rock emerged, a giant fossilized sponge of warrens that the miners had dug by hand. About two thousand miners, all in Wellington boots, many bearing spades and picks, swarmed among the pits and trenches, some delving as deep as 15 metres into the ground with only rudimentary props to keep the sides from burying them alive. Some looked decidedly younger than eighteen. One was clearly baffled by the white-skinned visitor whose hair was longer than the standard Congolese buzz cut. ‘He has the voice of a man,’ the young miner intoned with consternation to one of my companions, ‘but the hair of a woman.’

On the next hill over we could make out Mwangachuchu’s mine. All this territory lay under his concession, but the informal miners had enough political clout to carry on regardless of his protests, in part thanks to ethnic manoeuvring by the cooperative’s Hutu leadership against the Tutsi Mwangachuchu. The cooperative had resisted Mwangachuchu’s repeated attempts to turf them off his land, challenging the validity of his claim. Mwangachuchu has countered by trying to oblige the informal miners to sell all their production through his company, without which it would be impossible for him to prove that minerals from the concession were not funding militias.

The chief miner, Bazinga Kabano, a well-dressed man with a long walking cane and a penchant for bellowing at his subordinates, told me that when the CNDP controlled the area the miners’ association used to pay the rebels a $50 fee to be allowed to dig. But he was keen to paint his industry not as an engine of war but as a path to betterment. He explained that some of the miners graduated to be négociants, the intermediaries who buy coltan at the mine and sell it on to the comptoirs that export it. Surveying the teeming hilltop, he declared, ‘We are helping them to live their dreams.’

I wandered off to talk to some miners out of earshot of the boss. Kafanya Salongo bore a passing resemblance to a meerkat as his blinking head popped out of a hole in the ground. He was short, slim and strong, ideal for a human burrower. He churned out one hundred sacks worth of rock a day, and that brought in $9. From that he had to find the $25 each miner must pay the bosses every month for the privilege of digging. ‘It’s not enough for the family,’ he told me. ‘I can afford some food and some medicine, but that’s it.’ At thirty-two, he had a wife and two sons. He laughed in the face of danger. ‘Yeah, it looks dangerous, but we know how to construct the shafts, so it’s fine.’

It is easy to scoff at the boss’s notion that these miners are digging toward their dreams. The work is gruelling and perilous. The official statistics recorded twenty deaths in mining accidents in North Kivu in 2012, six of them at an adjacent mine worked by the cooperative. The authorities noted that it is ‘very possible’ that not all deaths were reported. But by local standards the miners’ wages amount to big bucks. Some splash their pay on booze and hookers; some build better houses.

Kabila’s mining ban and the boycott prompted by the Dodd–Frank Act pitched thousands of eastern Congolese miners out of work. The World Bank has estimated that 16 per cent of Congo’s population is directly or indirectly engaged in informal mining, which accounts for all but a fraction of the industry as measured by employment;

in North Kivu in 2006 mining revenue provided an estimated two-thirds of state income.

But revenues to the provincial government’s coffers fell by three-quarters in the four years before 2012, in part because of what officials called the ‘global criminalization of the mining sector’ of eastern Congo. The state’s loss is the smugglers’ gain: when the official routes are closed, the clandestine trade picks up the slack.

By the middle of 2013 Kabila’s ban had been partially relaxed, and previously blacklisted comptoirs in Goma had reopened. A dozen mines in North Kivu that the government deemed to be unconnected to armed groups had been ‘green-lighted’ to export. But Emmanuel Ndimubanzi, the head of North Kivu’s mining division, told me that not a single mine was tagging its output so that buyers could identify the mine at which it had originated. ‘Tagging is very expensive,’ he said. ‘We don’t have the partners to pay for it.’ In what might have been a line from Catch-22, he added, ‘Certification can only happen with better security.’

Regional initiatives are increasingly tracking shipments of coltan and other ores, even if North Kivu is lagging behind. Some campaigners have welcomed what appears to be a significant reduction in the documented connections between militias and mining sites as a result of certification efforts and a UN-backed offensive against the armed groups.

Gradually Western-based electronics groups are drawing up lists of approved smelters that can demonstrate that their metals come from mines that do not benefit Congolese militias, although the campaign group Global Witness warned in 2014 that the first supply-chain reports, which US companies buying Congolese minerals are now required to submit to regulators, ‘lack substance’.

The German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources has developed ‘fingerprinting’ technology that can trace a shipment of ore back to the mine from which it was extracted. This technology could, if comprehensively applied, prevent the entry into the international market of minerals from militia-controlled mines, provided that it were matched with an intelligence-gathering programme to keep tabs on all the militias’ mining operations.

It appears unlikely that the certification schemes will ever reliably cover the whole of eastern Congo’s mining trade. Clean miners have been squeezed, as the retreat of Western buyers has let Chinese comptoirs gain a near-monopoly on Congolese coltan, allowing them to dictate prices. The efforts to impose some control on the mineral trade might trim the income of the armed groups, but it does so at the cost of weakening the already precarious livelihoods of eastern Congo’s diggers and porters and their dependents. In a land ruled by the law of the roadblock, such initiatives can look quixotic. As Aloys Tegera of Goma’s Pole Institute, one of eastern Congo’s most astute commentators, writes, ‘Without a Congolese state capable of playing its role in controlling and running affairs, how can the minerals of Kivu be de-criminalised?’

In the run-up to the 2011 elections and during the months that followed, the SMKK transactions and other similar ones effectively transferred hundreds of millions of dollars from the state to a close personal friend of a president. Dan Gertler has doubled as an emissary for the president, conducting diplomatic missions to Washington and Rwanda. ‘The truth is, during our very difficult times, there were investors who came and left and others who braved the hurricane,’ Kabila has said of Gertler.

‘He’s one of those.’ Kabila might have added that some of those who left did so when their assets were confiscated – and, in some cases, handed to Gertler.

Gertler maintains that, far from being a predator, he is among Congo’s greatest benefactors. He and his representatives point out, with some justification, that unlike the most egregious asset-flippers, who do nothing beyond using bribes and connections to win mining rights before selling them on, Gertler’s operations in Congo actually produce minerals, and lots of them. His company, the Fleurette Group, says it has invested $1.5 billion ‘in the acquisition and development of mining and other assets in the DRC’, that it supports twenty thousand Congolese jobs, and that it ranks among the country’s biggest taxpayers and philanthropists.

Gertler himself has said his work in Congo is worthy of a Nobel Prize.

Katumba’s death sent a tremor through Kabila’s regime. Would-be investors whose only contract was an understanding they had reached with Katumba evaporated after the plane crash. But the president and Gertler, brothers in spirit, have maintained the shadow government that Katumba helped to construct. Gertler has branched out into oil, prospecting promising new sites at Lake Albert. As for Kabila, he must now decide whether to run in the next elections, due in 2016. To do so he would need to induce the national assembly to change the constitution and remove the two-term limit for presidents, then conduct what one election monitor at the 2011 polls told me would need to be ‘a huge rigging operation’ to overcome the electorate’s outrage. To pull off such an expensive task, Kabila would need to ratchet up the looting machine once again.

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Incubators of Poverty (#ulink_85f8f829-9956-58c8-9200-7e670f4b7e14)

THE CHIEF OF the border post let out another long sigh. ‘On attend.’ The wait had already lasted hours. Not for the first time I was at the mercy of a temperamental fax machine. I was trying to cross the Nigerian border with its northern neighbour, Niger, where the official language changes from English to French. Someone in the visa section of Niger’s embassy in Nigeria had neglected to send some document or other to headquarters to authorize my visa, and faxing it over was proving complicated. I sat on the stoop of the border post, looking out over the scorched terrain that leads up to the Sahara. Goats, the hungry and the maimed shuffled between breezeblock structures, lashed by the swirling dust. Periodically the chief of the border post would make a call on his mobile phone to check whether I should be allowed to pass. Then he would resume his contemplative silence, speaking only to bemoan ‘this interminable heat’. The sun was melting the horizon to a shimmer. ‘On attend.’

Whiling away the morning beside the taciturn border chief offered me an opportunity to observe one of the few effective institutions in this part of the world: the smuggling racket.

Dozens of trucks were queuing to cross from Niger into Nigeria. Their contents seemed harmless enough: many contained textiles and clothing bound for the markets of Kano and Kaduna, northern Nigeria’s two main cities.

Weapons and unwilling human traffic cross Nigeria’s northern border covertly. But the flow of counterfeit Chinese-made textiles has grown so voluminous that it would be impossible to keep it secret even if secrecy were required to ensure its safe passage. All the same, most of the shipments go through under cover of darkness. Those who control the trade engage in highly organized ‘settling’, or bribing, of the border officials, smoothing the textiles’ transit.

The Nigerian stretch is just the final leg of a 10,000-kilometre journey. It begins in Chinese factories, churning out imitations of the textiles that Nigerians previously produced for themselves, with their signature prime colours and waxiness to the touch. By the boatload they arrive in west Africa’s ports, chiefly Cotonou, Benin’s biggest city, a tiny country beside Nigeria that has, like Montenegro in Europe or Paraguay in South America, become a state whose major economic activity is the trans-shipment of contraband. At the ports the counterfeit consignments are loaded onto trucks and either driven straight over the land border between Benin and western Nigeria or up through Niger and round to the border post with its taciturn chief. The trade is estimated to be worth about $2 billion a year, equivalent to about a fifth of all annual recorded imports of textiles, clothing, fabric and yarn into the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.

Smuggling is a long-established profession here. Before colonial cartographers imposed the frontier, today’s smuggling routes were the byways of legitimate commerce. The border marks a delineation of what used to be British and French territory in west Africa, but no natural division of language or ethnicity exists. People on both sides speak Hausa, a tongue in which the word for smuggling, sumoga, strikes a less pejorative note than its English equivalent. The textile-smuggling bosses are the oligarchs of the northern borderlands. For those in their pay, they can be generous benefactors.

Not being a roll of fake west African fabric, I was not a priority for processing. Eventually the border chief’s phone rang. Off we trundled, past trucks with ‘Chine’ daubed on the side, a brazen reference to their cargo’s origin. Another name went unrecorded, that of the trucks’ proprietor. Few dare to speak it openly here. But further to the south, where the truckloads of counterfeit textiles have helped to wreak economic destruction, I had heard it whispered a year earlier.

A country of 170 million people – home to one in six Africans, three main ethnic groups subdivided into hundreds more speaking five hundred languages and bolted together on the whim of British colonial administrators; split between a north that largely follows Allah and a south more partial to the Christian God and animist deities; hollowed out by corruption that has fattened a ruling class of stupendous wealth while most of the rest lack the means to fill their stomachs, treat their ailments, or educate their children; humiliated by a reputation for contributing little to human endeavour but venal politicians and ingenious scams – Nigeria has paid quite a price for the dubious honour of being the continent’s biggest oil producer.

The crude began to flow in 1956, four years before independence from Britain. Almost immediately it started to ruin Nigeria. Two-thirds of the newfound oil reserves lay within the territory that secessionists claimed for themselves when they declared the Republic of Biafra in 1967, raising the stakes in the standoff between the ethnic blocs vying for power in the young nation. Between five hundred thousand and 2 million Nigerians died in the civil war that ensued, many from starvation. Nigeria remained whole, but any hope that it might rise as a black star to lead an independent Africa dissipated as dictator followed ruinous dictator. Instead, it became a petro-state, where oil accounts for four in every five dollars of government revenue and capturing a share of the resource rent is a life-and-death struggle.

The Niger Delta, the maze of creeks where the River Niger reaches the sea at Nigeria’s southern edge, proved to be a prodigious font of crude. Along with the offshore discoveries that followed, it made Nigeria a major supplier of oil to the United States and the fourth-biggest source of European oil imports. Few countries can claim to be so vital a source of the basic ingredient of the world’s oil-fired economy. Nigeria’s stocks of natural gas, estimated to be the eighth-largest on the planet, have scarcely been tapped, but they already account for one in every twenty cubic feet that the European Union imports.

The insidious effects of oil have permeated outward from the brutalized, despoiled and destitute Niger Delta. I had been living in Nigeria for less than two weeks when I arrived in Kaduna. The city is the gateway between the Christian south and the northern half of the country, an expanse that stretches up to the border with Niger and used to form part of an Islamic caliphate that the jihad of Usman dan Fodio founded two hundred years ago. Kaduna lies in the turbulent Middle Belt, prone to spasms of communal violence when patronage politics, dressed in the garb of religion or ethnicity, turns bloody.

On a stifling Sunday morning a friend took me around Kaduna’s central market, a teeming grid of wooden booths. Many of the stalls were selling clothes. Some bore the misspellings that are counterfeiters’ inadvertent trademark: ‘Clavin Klein’ read one shirt label. Others carried the equivalent of the appellation d’origine contrôlée badges that French vineyards and cheese makers append to their produce. ‘Made in Nigeria’ the labels declared. But they were fake too. Aike, a young trader from the East, told me he stocked up on bogus labels when he went north to Kano to replenish his supplies of lace. ‘Mostly everything is made in China,’ explained another trader selling jeans.

At Raymond Okwuanyinu’s stall I found rolls and rolls of the coloured fabric that is used for fashioning a popular style of billowing trousers. Here there was no attempt at subterfuge. Raymond told me it was a matter of simple economics. Nigeria may be the largest source of African energy exports, but it generates only enough electricity to power one toaster for every forty-four of its own people. Billions of dollars assigned to fix the rundown power stations and the dilapidated grid have been squandered or pilfered. A privatization drive in recent years has raised some tentative hope of improvement, but for now Nigeria produces only half as much electricity as North Korea. Even those lucky enough to be connected to a functioning cable face the maddening task of negotiating with what used to be called the National Electric Power Authority, or NEPA (but known as Never Expect Power Anytime). It was rebranded as the Power Holding Company of Nigeria, or PHCN (Please Have Candles Nearby or, simply, Problem Has Changed Name). Most must make do with spluttering diesel generators. In a country where 62 per cent of people live on less than $1.25 a day, running a generator costs about twice as much as the average Briton pays for electricity.

The crippling cost of electricity makes Nigerian textiles expensive to produce. Raymond, the Kaduna trader, told me he could sell trousers made from Chinese fabric at two-thirds the price of those made from Nigerian fabric and still turn a profit. Hillary Umunna, a few stalls over, concurred. The government’s attempt to support the Nigerian textile sector by banning imports was futile, Hillary opined, his tailor’s tape-measure draped around his shoulders. ‘These things now,’ he said, gesturing at his wares, ‘they say it is contraband. They can’t produce it, but they ban it. So we have to smuggle.’

The cheaper price of smuggled garments relative to locally produced ones was good news, superficially at least, for the traders’ hard-pressed customers but less so for the employees of Nigeria’s textile industry. ‘It is a pitiable situation,’ said Hillary, apparently oblivious to his and his colleagues’ role in their compatriots’ downfall. ‘All the [textile factories] we have here have shut down. The workers are now on the streets.’

In the mid-1980s Nigeria had 175 textile mills. Over the quarter-century that followed, all but 25 shut down. Many of those that have struggled on do so only at a fraction of their capacity. Of the 350,000 people the industry employed in its heyday, making it comfortably Nigeria’s most important manufacturing sector, all but 25,000 have lost their jobs.

Imports comprise 85 per cent of the market, despite the fact that importing textiles is illegal. The World Bank has estimated that textiles smuggled into Nigeria through Benin are worth $2.2 billion a year, compared with local Nigerian production that has shrivelled to $40 million annually.

A team of experts working for the United Nations concluded in 2009, ‘The Nigerian textile industry is on the verge of a total collapse.’

Given the power crisis, the near-impassable state of Nigeria’s roads and the deluge of counterfeit clothes, it is a wonder that the industry kept going as long as it did.

The knock-on effects of this collapse are hard to quantify, but they ripple far into the Nigerian economy, especially in the North. About half of the million farmers who used to grow cotton to supply textile mills no longer do so, although some have switched to other crops. Formal jobs in Nigeria are scarce and precious. Each textile employee supports maybe half a dozen relatives. It is safe to say that the destruction of the Nigerian textile industry has blighted millions of lives.

After I left Kaduna’s market my friend took me to meet some of those who had felt the industry’s collapse hardest. Sitting around on rickety desks in the half-light of a classroom beside the church where some of Kaduna’s Christians were loudly asking a higher power for succour, nine redundant textile workers poured forth their woes. Tens of thousands of textile jobs had disappeared in Kaduna alone, the mill hands told me. I had seen the factory where some of them used to work. The gates of the United Nigerian Textiles plant were firmly shuttered. Jagged glass topped the high walls, and a lone security guard kept watch, protecting the machinery within on the minuscule chance that it would someday whir into action again.

No other living thing came or went, save for the yellow-headed lizards scuttling among the undergrowth.

Father Matthew Hassan Kukah looked pained as he recalled the day when the factory, Kaduna’s last, had closed its doors the previous year. The hymns from his Sunday service had subsided. Like Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa, Kukah is a figure of moral authority in Nigeria – and shares with Tutu a subversive sense of humour in the face of adversity. Kukah’s voice needles the mighty as few others can. The demise of Kaduna’s textile industry had drained the life from the city, he told me, sitting in a sweltering office above his sacristy and dressed in a simple black vestment. ‘We’ve gone backward twenty years,’ he said. ‘Back in the seventies there were textiles, people were energetic. But that generation was not able to produce the young, upwardly mobile elite. That’s what their children should have been.’ Kaduna’s impoverished inhabitants had retreated into their ethnic and religious identities. ‘Kaduna is now a tale of two cities,’ said the priest. ‘This side of the river is Christians; the other is Muslims.’

Kaduna’s decline was only one symptom of Nigeria’s descent into privation, Kukah went on. The national political class had abandoned civic duty to line its own pockets instead. The social fabric had been rent. ‘As a result of the collapse of the state, everybody, from the president down, is trying to find his own power, his own security. People are falling back on vigilante groups.’ Violence had become the tenor of life. ‘Everywhere in the world the ghettoes are combustible. The North is an incubator of poverty.’

The former mill hands among Kukah’s congregation and Kaduna’s Muslims shared in that poverty: buying food, let alone paying school fees that even the dilapidated state-run schools charge, was a daily trial. The mill hands told me they had tried to hold a demonstration outside the state governor’s house, but the police had blocked them. The federal government had repeatedly promised to bail out the industry, yet little assistance had been forthcoming. The more clear-eyed workers realized that, in any case, the game was up. Even if they could get the factories running again, Chinese contraband had so thoroughly captured the market that it would be impossible for the Nigerian operations to compete. And there was something that had accelerated the mill hands’ consignment to the trash can of globalization. Shuffling their feet and looking warily around for anyone who might be eavesdropping, the men murmured a single word: ‘Mangal.’

Alhaji Dahiru Mangal is a businessman whose fortune is thought to run to billions, a confidant of presidents, a devout Muslim, and a philanthropist whose airline transports Nigerian pilgrims to the annual hajj in Mecca. He also ranks among west Africa’s pre-eminent smugglers.

Growing up in Katsina, the last outpost before Nigeria’s frontier with Niger, Mangal received little formal education. More cosmopolitan Nigerian businessmen speak of him with a mixture of snobbery, envy and fear. He got his start as a teenager in the 1980s, following his father into the import-export business, and he swiftly made the cross-border freight routes his own.

‘He is shrewd,’ a northern leader who knows him told me. ‘He knows how to make money.’

In the shadier corners of the workshop of the world Mangal found the perfect business partners. ‘The Chinese attacked at the heart of the industry: the wax-print and African-print segment,’ a consultant who has spent years investigating – and trying to reverse – the slow death of Nigerian textiles explained to me. During the 1990s Chinese factories began copying west African designs and opening their own distribution branches in the region. ‘This is 100 percent illicit – but the locals do the smuggling,’ the consultant went on. There are, he said, sixteen factories in China dedicated to churning out textiles with a ‘Made in Nigeria’ badge sewn into them. For a time the Chinese material was of a much lower quality than Nigerian originals, but that gap narrowed as Chinese standards rose. The Chinese began to take control of the market, in league with Nigerian vendors. Mangal acts as the facilitator, the conduit between manufacturer and distributor, managing a shadow economy that includes the border authorities and his political allies. Like many others who profit from the resource curse, he plies the hidden byways of the globalized economy.

Mangal’s network of warehouses and agents stretches to Dubai, the Gulf emirate where much clandestine African business is done, and beyond into China and India. ‘You put it in his warehouse, and he will smuggle,’ a top northern banker told me. ‘He controls the import of everything that requires duty or is contraband.’