Billionaire former Glencore oil trader charged with corruption in West Africa

So basically having to make payments to win contracts from the utterly corrupt governments of Nigeria, Cameroon and the Ivory Coast as government officials lined their own pockets and those of their families selling off their countries resources to the benefit of no one but themselves. This is standard practice in virtually every sub Saharan African country, corruption reigns supreme across the continent.

We then have people complaining that former colonial powers are ‘stealing’ the resources of Africa. No, they are not. The only organisations or individuals stealing resources are your own governments who steal from the populace in order to use a countries resources to increase their own personal wealth, at the expense of the nation they supposedly act in the best interest of. Corruption is endemic in the psyche in this part of the world to a greater extent than just about anywhere else. Government means primarily the opportunity to increase the individual wealth of those in control not by legal means, but by theft, state capture and outright corruption using the country in question’s resources as the key to doing so, despite those resources belonging to the nation. Its why up to 80 years after colonialism ended we still have countless extremely poor countries across the continent with low GDPs, high unemployment, very poor living standards and daily incomes of a few dollars per day, despite many countries seemingly being asset rich. All of those resources have been misappropriated and sold off to international investors & businesses.

While these traders who break corruption rules should be dealt with accordingly, the real villains of the piece are those governments flogging off their countries resources to the highest bidder. It is literally impossible to win any government contract in most of Africa without having to make illegal payments to bribe a government official, in some cases this has to happen on several stages of the chain, even in supposedly developed countries like Nigeria & South Africa where the ANC have taken their role in a new democratic South African as an opportunity to steal & thieve as much as they could from their own people, in a country where only 11% of the population earn enough to pay income tax. As more & more primarily white but also some middle class black people leave, the income tax revenue is going to fall even further.

To the neoliberal who downvoted because they don’t like hearing the truth, you carry on with your head in the sand and therefore condone government corruption to continue ad infinitum, just because the truth sits outside your bubble of beliefs.