Looting Africa The Economics of Exploitation

Using a wealth of official data, this book demonstrates how the people of Sub-Saharan Africa are still become poorer. Despite recent rhetoric from Tony Blair's Africa Commission, the G7 finance ministers' debt relief, the Live 8 concerts and Make Poverty History campaign, the G8 Gleneagles promises, the United Nations 2005 summit and Millennium Development Goals and the Hong Kong WTO meeting, Africa's gains in these venues were largely limited to public relations. The central problems remain the exploitative debt and financial relationships with the North, the character of phantom aid, unfair trade, distorted investment and the continent's brain/skills drain. Moreover, instead of generating a productive business class, capitalism in most African countries witnessed the emergence of excessively powerful ruling elites with incomes inordinately based upon financial-parasitical accumulation. But while most mainstream literature about Africa overstresses the 'mistakes' of elites, it is crucial to Bond's analysis that, in the spirit of Walter Rodney, we also contextualise Africa's wealth outflow within a stagnant but volatile world economy.

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.