Burgis’ previous book, The Looting Machine, was a superb chronicle of the resource curse and corruption at work in Africa. This follow-up looks at the global rise of kleptocrats, from China to Russia to Trump’s White House, who are bent on the privatisation of power for naked personal gain. It is a gripping work of narrative non-fiction with a profoundly disturbing message: vast amounts of dirty money are flowing through the veins of the global financial system, enabled by a new and profoundly predatory elite. 

Among the things which Burgis brings to light is a little-known work of German scholarship, Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, by  Ernst Fraenkel. A dissident who remained hidden in plain sight until he had to flee Nazi Germany, he wanted to get to the bottom of “a regime whose defining attribute is to disguise its true nature”. What he detected was a kind of cohabitation. On one hand you have a “normative state”, which respects its own laws on the surface, notably those related to business to help keep the capitalist economy humming. Alongside it lies a sinister “prerogative state” which violates the same laws, a “jurisdiction over jurisdiction” which could do as it pleased. 

Zuma and the Guptas are not Nazis, but their alleged shenanigans and looting look very much like a “dual state” act through this insightful prism. One state paints the veneer of upholding the law, while the other is busy with the looting game. 

Burgis has assembled a colourful cast of characters on his stage. There is Nigel Wilkins, the head of compliance at the London office of the Swiss bank BSI, who emerges as an unlikely hero. There is the “Trio” from the steppes of central Asia who fronted Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC), the FTSE-listed mining firm that mimicked the dual state in its dual corporate role. On the one hand, a publicly listed company with all of the transparency that allegedly entails. On the other, an entity that allows hundreds of millions of dollars to go “astray” under the cloak of acquisitions. One such transaction was a manganese project in South Africa. André Bekker, a geologist, suspected something was dodgy there. He was subsequently found dead in the back of a torched car in Johannesburg. 

A starring role is given to Nursultan Nazarbayev, the ruler of Kazakhstan since 1989, and an assortment of other strongmen or wanna-be strongmen: Robert Mugabe, Joseph Kabila, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump. There are mysterious deaths from malaria in the United States, and a mother and daughter effectively kidnapped and whisked out of Italy on a private jet. 

The one unifying thread to this narrative is dirty money, and how its flows are enabled by those in power, and how it props up those in power, be it through tax havens, layered fronts, plain bribes or elaborate laundry operations. There is the $1-billion that ENRC spent to buy Camec, “the mining company that had acquired a Zimbabwean platinum prospect by agreeing to send Robert Mugabe’s regime $100-million just when he needed funds to steal the 2008 election”. The likes of Billy Rautenbach also figure prominently in this narrative. 

When it comes to the kleptocrats, or kleptopians as he calls them, Burgis writes that: “There’s only one side to be on if you wish to avoid destruction: theirs. You are with the kleptopians or are against them. The Earth cannot sustain us all. We are hoarding, we will be ready. Do you want to learn to love the Kleptopia and be brought within the wall? Or would you rather be outside, in the wilderness that we used to call the commons, defenseless as the water rises? Choose.”

Remember when Jacob Zuma once intoned that it was “cold and rough outside the ANC”. That may have been what he was hinting at. DM/BM