The Looting Machine: Warlords, Tycoons, Smugglers and the Systematic Theft of Africa’s Wealth. Tom Burgis
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.7 ‘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.’
From his base in Katsina Mangal arranges the import of food, fuel, and anything his wealthy Nigerian clients might desire. But the staple of his operation is the textiles that have helped kill off the local industry. He is said to charge a flat fee of 2 million naira (about $13,000) per cargo, plus the cost of goods.8 In 2008 Mangal was estimated to be bringing about a hundred 40-foot shipping containers across the frontier each month.9
Mangal’s fortunes have risen and fallen with Nigeria’s procession of dictators. When democracy – and, notionally, the rule of law – returned in 1999, he needed allies in the new order. He found one in Umaru Yar’Adua. The People’s Democratic Party, the affiliation comprising most of Nigeria’s political elites that would dominate the new dispensation, had chosen Yar’Adua to be the governor of Mangal’s home state, Katsina. Several northern leaders, businessmen and government insiders told me Mangal was one of the most generous funders of Yar’Adua’s two successful gubernatorial campaigns, in 1999 and 2003.
The master smuggler’s political largesse did not make him entirely immune, however. Around 2005 Olusegun Obasanjo, the former military ruler then embarking on his second term as elected president, decided to do something about smuggling and the damage it was causing to the textile industry. Obasanjo was told, according to a consultant who was involved in lobbying the president, that Mangal was ‘the kingpin’. Obasanjo dispatched Nasir El-Rufai, a northern-born minister with a reputation as a reformer, to try to get Mangal to clean up his act.10 El-Rufai told me he reached an agreement with Yar’Adua, the beneficiary of Mangal’s generous campaign funding and his political protector, and the smuggler would endeavour to transform himself into a legitimate businessman.
El-Rufai recalled that Mangal asked him, ‘Why does Obasanjo call me a smuggler? I just do logistics. I don’t buy any of the goods that are smuggled. I’m just providing a service.’ Mangal told El-Rufai that he had a fleet of six hundred trucks plying the trade routes. He promised to switch into refined petroleum products, another time-honoured money spinner for Nigeria’s politically connected trading barons. But the illicit textile trade continued, and Mangal’s operations remained under scrutiny. Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, traditionally nothing more than a vehicle for settling political scores, had gained some teeth and a degree of independence under an energetic fraud-buster called Nuhu Ribadu. It began to take an interest in Mangal.11 But then the gods of Nigeria’s petro-politics smiled on the smuggler once again.
When Obasanjo’s attempts to change the constitution to allow himself a third term as president were thwarted, he sought to maintain his influence from behind the scenes by plucking Yar’Adua from the obscurity of Katsina to be the People’s Democratic Party candidate in the 2007 presidential elections – tantamount, given the party’s dominance, to handing him the keys to the presidential palace. Mangal contributed to Yar’Adua’s presidential campaign, along with other backers who had also attracted the attention of the anticorruption squad. Not long after Yar’Adua took office they got their payback. Ribadu was forced out, and the anticorruption unit’s teeth were pulled. ‘The moment Yar’Adua became president [Mangal] had a blank cheque,’ El-Rufai, whom Yar’Adua also cast into the wilderness, told me. It was another death knell for the north’s textile industry.
Mangal and the rest of northern Nigeria’s crime lords can trace their hegemony – and the abandoned textile workers their strife – to the discovery of oil in the Niger Delta.
In 1959, three years after Royal Dutch Shell struck oil in commercial quantities in the Delta, the company sank another well by the village of Slochteren in the northern Netherlands, in partnership with Exxon of the United States. They discovered the biggest gas field in Europe. A gas bonanza followed. It was not long, however, before the Dutch began to wonder whether the discovery had truly been a blessing. People outside the energy industry started losing their jobs.12 Other sectors of the economy slumped, following a pattern that The Economist would, in 1977, diagnose as ‘Dutch Disease’.
What happened in the Netherlands was not an isolated outbreak, even if a prosperous European country was better placed than many to withstand it. Dutch Disease is a pandemic whose symptoms, in many cases, include poverty and oppression.
The disease enters a country through its currency. The dollars that pay for exported hydrocarbons, minerals, ores and gems push up the value of the local currency. Imports become cheaper relative to locally made products, undercutting homegrown enterprises. Arable land lies fallow as local farmers find that imported fare has displaced their produce. For countries that have started to industrialize, the process goes into reverse; those that aspire to industrialize are stymied. Processing natural commodities can multiply their value four hundredfold, but, lacking industrial capacity, Africa’s resource states watch their oil and minerals sail away in raw form for that value to accrue elsewhere.13
A cycle of economic addiction sets in: the decay of the other parts of the economy increases the dependency on natural resources. Opportunity becomes confined to the resources business, but only for the few: whereas mines and oil fields require vast sums of capital, they employ tiny workforces compared with farming or manufacturing. As oil or mining suck the life from the rest of the economy, infrastructure that could foster broader opportunities – electricity grids, roads, schools – is neglected.
In Africa Dutch Disease is chronic and debilitating. Instead of broad economies with an industrial base to provide mass employment, poverty breeds and the resource sector becomes an enclave of plenty