After Voices for African Liberation: Conversations with the Review of African Political Economy, ROAPE is pleased to publish a new edited collection, Capitalism and Economic Crime in Africa: The Neoliberal Period. The volume brings together a collection of research articles, briefings and blog posts that were published over a period of nearly 40 years (1986–2023), in our journal and on our website. Here, editor Jörg Wiegratz introduces the book, followed by Yusuf K. Serunkuma’s foreword to the collection. Both Wiegratz and Serunkuma firmly locate economic crime in Africa within a global, neoliberal capitalist order that sustains accumulation in the global centres of power and wealth and reproduces dependency and underdevelopment on the continent.
Editor
Jörg Wiegratz
The book offers an analysis of economic crimes and market irregularities, including matters of trickery, illicit trade, parallel economy, economies of violence and criminalisation of the poor in neoliberal Africa. It interrogates economic crime as a product of neoliberal reform and transformation (as well as of historical structures). It unpacks crime as a social – and particularly as a political-economic – phenomenon of capitalism. The volume explores what these economic crimes have to do with, and can tell us about, power, class, accumulation, dependency, (under)development, state–business relations and capitalist transformation on the continent.
In so doing, it sheds new light on the co-production of these crimes by a range of actors from the realms of economy, politics and international development, including international financial institutions and other donors. It responds to the imperative to advance the analysis of the link between capitalism and crime in Africa as more countries across the continent become fully capitalist societies.
Illustrating the relevance of African cases to debates in and across various disciplines – concerning, for example, corporate and white-collar crimes, state crimes, crimes of the powerful, (il)legality, regulation and social harm – this volume engages with a variety of literature to explain economic crimes as phenomena of global and local capitalism. The book includes a foreword by Yusuf K. Serunkuma and an afterword by Laureen Snider. Roape.net today publishes Serunkuma’s foreword.
Serunkuma’s analysis takes into focus the temporal dimension of corporate crime. He notes that scholars often write about the state of affairs in contemporary Africa without properly integrating the criminal activities of corporations into their analysis. This is partly because the scale, details and impact of the most recent and ongoing crimes are to a large degree unknown by the time of present-day analysis. It’s common for corporate crimes to be investigated, exposed and prosecuted many years, if not decades, after the crime takes place. He wonders what to make then of scholarship – on democratic governance, poverty, human rights, political violence, or economic development in African countries – that does not factor in corporate crimes of major entities, such as transnational corporations.
Further, when eventually a court ruling against a Western corporate criminal is announced in the Western metropole (as in a recent case of corruption by the company Glencore in South Sudan), the victims of ‘yesterday’ in the periphery are unlikely ever to hear about the news from the court, let alone benefit from what capital pays as fines to the metropole state. Further, Serunkuma notes that Western wealth and lives are underpinned and enabled by corporate criminality carried out in Africa. The criminal extraction and pillage from the continent are outsourced to corporations. This is a continuation of a core feature of European colonialism of yesterday in today’s age of neoliberalism, that is, under conditions of neo-coloniality.
Overall, the texts in the collection show the analytical relevance and fruitfulness of an engagement with economic crimes for understanding contemporary capitalism in Africa. The papers further confirm the importance of paying attention to history and structure and in using critical lenses in the study of the many actors (including state, capital and international organisations) that are implicated in the social making of criminogenic capitalism. The authors brought together here unpack and critique, in a timespan of over three decades, the mainstream approaches and discourses regarding crimes (and its containment) in the economy and point out their analytical and political-economic shortcomings.
The combined material is a resource for a historical and critical account of the many facets of the links between capitalism, crime and violence, past, present and future. Crimes can be lucrative and that matters, after all, to many, for many reasons, in the world of current capitalism. Crimes are here to stay – in all probability at staggering forms and levels – in any of the future capitalisms. The crucial question is this: how can the grand criminal accumulators of our time (and their many enablers) be confronted and resisted economically, politically, legally, socially and culturally? A lot is at stake…
Foreword
Yusuf K. Serunkuma
On 2 November 2022, Bloomberg reported a story about how, less than four weeks after South Sudan gained independence in 2011, a delegation of Glencore Plc traders flew into Juba by private jet in search of oil. The publication of this story followed the conclusion of a court case filed by the UK government’s Severe Fraud Office (SFO) investigators. The Bloomberg story recorded that the court found the Glencore executives guilty of, among other accusations, “carrying with them $800,000 in cash to pay bribes” across the African continent to acquire undue advantage in existing agreements.
In a more startling revelation – a key, but more hidden feature in the chronicles of ‘capitalism and economic crime’ in Africa – the newspaper noted that over the period of 2011–19:
These traders hand delivered large quantities of cash to government officials, they sought to profit from political turmoil and they inserted themselves into government-to-government deals that had been already negotiated at preferential rates (emphasis added).
The reporting of this story is itself instructive. Many newspapers across the Western world carried this story, taking different angles and editing them along the way, sometimes deleting entire sections. Bloomberg initially titled the article, in somewhat scholarly, non-journalistic fashion, Cash, traders and oil: how Glencore bribed its way across Africa, but the story underwent several edits as more details emerged. Currently, at the time of publication of this book, the story is titled UK court fines Glencore for bribing its way across Africa. When the story first appeared on the Bloomberg website, it was free to read for anyone with access to the Internet. But currently it is locked behind a paywall.
One cannot miss the double injustice to specifically African publics – the actual victims of Glencore’s crimes – as reporters of gigantic corporate crime (the first crime) thus draw profit from the act of reporting this crime (the second crime). Consider that the real victims of this crime may never even hear about the story because they can neither access an Internet connection, and nor do many then have the resources to pay to read the article. Seen through a centre–periphery dichotomy, this is the absolute embodiment of the multifaceted conspiracy of the capitalist machine against its victims, where criticisms of the crimes of capitalists are only visible and discussed at the centre.
Let us follow the details of this case more closely, as this is an outstanding and common – but perhaps one of the most deftly hidden – manifestation of capitalism in Africa, as this volume, with essays published across three decades, so succinctly demonstrates.
The SFO started its investigation in early 2019, focusing on the Africa desk in Glencore’s London offices, head office for the company’s oil and gas business. The investigation found that a total of US$29m in bribes had been handed out by Glencore “to secure its access to oil in Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and South Sudan”. Sums were withdrawn “in cash from the company’s Swiss cash desk, recorded as ‘office expenses’, despite there being limited evidence of any office operating in the country”. More money would be withdrawn as “service fees” (a whopping US$5.5m). The money “was used to bribe officials in the country’s national oil and gas companies”.
Glencore pleaded guilty to these accusations in June 2019 and the Southwark Crown Court judge, Justice Fraser, noted that “the facts demonstrate not only significant criminality but sophisticated devices to disguise it”. The company was ordered to pay a fine of US$400m – paltry in view of how much the company made and continues to make – which definitely, sadly, will never be given as compensation to the real, individual victims of the ongoing cycles of violence in South Sudan, Nigeria or Cameroon. Indeed, even when SFO director Lisa Osofsky acknowledged that “for years and across the globe, Glencore pursued profits to the detriment of national governments in some of the poorest countries in the world”, it was clear these people or countries – the on-the-ground victims of these crimes – would never receive any compensation.
Over and above these multiple injustices to the Africans, for the purposes of this volume four instructive conclusions can be made from the case above: (a) it becomes apparent that the full scale of this archive and record of events – with the open admission to crime, and fines – went unknown to the scholarly world for this entire decade. Considering that (b) these events were successful, as Glencore had planned, fomenting violence and profiting the company, it follows that these crimes, to use Marx’s term, formed the “material conditions” or the “problem space” in which individuals and families, small-scale businesses, local big businesses and governments in Sudan, Cameroon and Nigeria negotiated and made their history in this decade.
As this volume makes visible, it is arguable that (c) Glencore isn’t alone in playing this game. Other big corporations that have their headquarters in the Western world – working with local agents, of course – are busy finding illicit, clandestine, illegal, fraudulent, predatory, hidden, fake, militaristic, violent, collusive and back-door ways (these being the keywords to this volume) to advantage themselves in dominating and exploiting the African continent – and this appears to be a core component of what is discoursed as capitalism. These conclusions then help us to see the big picture – relating to scholarship about Africa, underdevelopment and capitalism – and I want to propose that the texts in this volume are read with the following concerns in mind.
How then should we think about the scholarship produced in this same period, focused on items such as democratic governance, poverty, human rights, political violence, kinship relations, food safety, environment and economics, or even seemingly distant subjects such as literature and popular culture, without integrating the crimes of Glencore and others in the overall analyses? Because they were unknown and were not part of the archive. On the other hand, how should we think about the UK itself and other big businesses based in Western capitals in Paris, Berlin, Bonn, Brussels and New York? Added to these, of course, is the quality of life of individual persons in the Western world who make their history in the material conditions enabled by, among others, their super-rich, who – as has just been demonstrated – are fomenting conflict in Africa? These questions need to be pondered and reflected upon intensely.
It should be obvious by now that I am a student of dependency theory (such as elaborated by Amin and Wallerstein), where the world is seen as divided into the centre and periphery, with the resources, often in the form of raw materials, moving from the periphery (mostly the so-called formerly colonised world) to the centre, which are often the capitals and industrial towns of the former colonisers and are now the centres of capitalism (of global banking, gambling and speculation). The ways in which these resources move to the centre – as this volume and the case of Glencore make clear – is often entirely criminal and fraudulent: patents, taxes, debt traps, trade misinvoicing, the fictions of value addition, open theft, unequal exchange, foreign aid, and soforth. These crimes sustain the vulgar levels of inequality between Africa and the Western world.
I also come to this volume as a decolonial scholar, discontented with the language games of discourse – stuff such as rethinking, re-examining, reframing, re-imagining – and knowledge production about Africa. While I appreciate these discourses as ways of mobilising a framework of studying and writing about the present nature of colonialism on the continent, I am disenchanted by sister disciplines (anthropology, international relations, political science, among others), by their failure to integrate political economic dynamics into their analyses of the world and by the tendency to read Africa as independently constituted and African actors as having absolute agency.
In the old order of decolonial thinking and reform (c.1960–80, specifically the period before structural adjustment), knowledge production focused on the ways through which people make their livelihoods and subsistence possible from within this dialectic of European–African interactions. It is my contention that analyses are incomplete, if not entirely inaccurate, when the material side of things – especially its often hidden criminality – is not made visible. It is my contention that political economy, especially one that highlights the circulations of capital and extraction, is the heart of revolutionary and meaningful scholarship, and the essays in this volume ought to be the beginning point of any scholarly agendas in whatever discipline.
Most of the essays in this volume are empirical writings, demonstrative of the ways in which capitalism reproduces itself. One therefore cannot miss the spirit in which this volume was put together: the activism about and criticism of the crimes of capitalism, and how these crimes ought to be exposed and challenged. These essays touch the different forms of ‘technocratisation’, depoliticisation and structuring of the violence of capitalism, and the open violence of the practice itself enabled by the very system upon which capitalism thrives.
It is not just structural adjustment, but the collusions of fertiliser industries, intellectual property and other seemingly benign moves, such as Kenya’s wars against drugs. We are prompted to ask: when does capitalism reproduce itself without crime? Does corruption have any moral, human ethic, outside the impetus of profiteering through dispossession? But, more importantly, one is made to appreciate the networks and sophistication with which these crimes are executed and, perhaps reiterating Marx’s proposition that revolution (not reform) was the most appropriate response to dealing with capitalism’s inhumanity, the manner in which they are disguised as progress.
Jörg Wiegratz is Lecturer in Political Economy of Global Development at the University of Leeds and Senior Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg. He specialises in neoliberalism, fraud and anti-fraud measures, commercialisation and economic pressure and related aspects of moral and political economy, with a focus on Uganda and Kenya. He is a member of the editorial working group of ROAPE. His books include Neoliberal Moral Economy: Capitalism, Socio-Cultural Change and Fraud in Uganda and Neoliberalism and the Moral Economy of Fraud.
Yusuf Serunkuma is a regular contributor to roape.net and a columnist in Uganda’s newspapers, as well as a scholar and a playwright. In 2014, Fountain Publishers published his first play, The Snake Farmers, which was received with critical acclaim in Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda.
Featured Photograph: Cover image of Capitalism and Economic Crime in Africa: The Neoliberal Period (25 June 2024).
