"Slowly my terror eased. What it left behind was guilt. I felt I ought to suffer as those died had - if not the same way, then somehow to the same degree."
"Oil accounts for 98 per cent of Angola's exports and about three-quarters of the government's income. If is also the lifeblood of the Futungo. When the International Monetary Fund examined Angola's national accounts in 2001, it found that between 2007 and 2010 $32 billion had gone missing, a sum greater than the gross domestic product of each of forty-three African countries and equivalent to one in every four dollars that the Angolan economy generates annually."
"Depending on the vagaries of supply chains, if you have a PlayStation or a pacemaker, an iPod, a laptop or a mobile phone, there is roughly a one-in-five chance that a tiny piece of eastern Congo is pulsing through it."
"The more the state crumbles, the greater the need for each individual to make ends meet however they can; the greater the looting, the more the authority of the state withers."
"Nigeria may be the largest source of African energy exports, but it generates only enough electricity to power on toaster for every forty-four of its own people."
"There are, he said, sixteen factories in China dedicated to churning out textiles with the 'Made in Nigeria' badge sewn into them. For a time the Chinese material was of a much lower quality than Nigerian originals, but the gap narrowed as Chinese standards rose."
"The resource business ruptures the social contract between rulers and ruled... Instead of calling their rulers to account, the citizens of resource states are reduced to angling for a share of the loot."
"Annual steel production worldwide is 1.5 billion tonnes, or roughly one tonne for every five people. The biggest steelmakers, among them ArcelorMittal, India's Tata family and Baosteel of China, bestride a global industrial economy that needs steel for ships and bridges, and forks and scalpels."
"The ones speaking Afrikaans were presumably members of the rough-and-ready corps of white South African former soldiers who signed up as mercenaries after apartheid and who are now to be found scattered across Africa, guarding mines in Congo or attempting coups in Equatorial Guinea."
"The mining giants appeared more determined to plant their flag in the mountain than to mine it."
"Nuclear power stations supply three-quarters of France's electricity. Areva, the French state-owned atomic energy group, held sway over the stretches of nothern Niger under which lie some of the planet's richest seams of uranium. Areva mines about a third of its uranium in Niger, with the rest coming from Canada and Kazakhstan. It is the world's biggest nuclear company, and its annual revenues are twice Niger's gross domestic product."
"In 2008, sub-Saharan Africa, with a population of 900 million, produced as much electricity as Spain, with a population of 47 million."
"Although there was legitimate uproar when a Chinese ship that docked in South Africa was found to contain weapons bound for Robert Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe, any notion that China is the sole or even the main source of the oceans of weapons that slosh through Africa is misplaced. One study by two Norway-based academics, based on years of arms import statistics and governance indicators, found that the United States had a greater propensity than China to sell weapons to repressive African governments."
"Without exception, through the 1990s every country that borrowed from the World Bank did worse the more it depended on extractive industries."
"With no record of service to point to, politics becomes a game of mobilizing one's ethnic brethren. For us to win, they have to lose. The social contract is replaced with c compact of violence."
"Corruption does not start or end at the borders of Nigeria or Angola or Equatorial Guinea. Its proponents include some of the world's biggest companies, among them the blue-chip multinationals in which, if you live in the West and have a pension, your money is almost certainly invested."
"... but I think Achebe was seeking to make a wider point about the human spirit: it is capable of loving and of participating in horrors in the same afternoon."
"If you subtract your country's rank on the human development index from its rank on the GDP per head index, you get an indication of the extent to which economic growth is actually bettering the lot of the average person in that country."
"The system is still there: these investors can still form a company without saying who they are, they can still anchor their business in a country that is not concerned about investors' behaviour overseas, and, sadly, there's no shortage of resource-rich fragile states on which these investors can prey."
"Commodities from every continent blend together in the snaking supply chains of the global economy, and it is safe to say that there are incognito nuggets of Africa for sale on my east London high street just as there are in the malls of Los Angeles and the boutiques of Rome. Likewise, through pension funds invested in their shares, we all enjoy the profits of the giant corporations of the oil and mining industries."
No comments:
Post a Comment