I'm not going to comment on the subject matter of this article, rather I think it's worth pointing out that we need more articles like this, investigating corrupt, shadowy organizations that are ripping off innocent people.
In fact, it would be nice if our journalists looked into some American corporations the way the Economist investigated Queensway.
Kudos to the Economist for doing reporting the way it should be done. Let's hope they continue pursuing this. This is journalism the way it should be done.
At some basic level you have to decide whether free flow of information is morally desirable or not. It’s somewhat axiomatic, you can argue it’s a good thing for efficient markets, but that is actually circular reasoning as someone who prefers inefficient markets would argue against the free flow of information and in favour of information asymmetry.
So I guess I’m saying that some people simply believe the world is a better place if there is more information going around, less secrecy, and fewer private deals between shsadowy figures.
Many of those peole are also in favour of fewer restraints on people’s right to make choices. That seems to capture much of the place where the hackeer ethos overlaps with the startup culture: "Let people does at they like without patents and other restrictions, but give everyone the information they need to decide what to do for themselves effectively.”
If I could sum it up in a phrase, I would borrow from Doctors: Informed Consent. To make an informed decision, you need to know the relevant facts and have a basic understanding of the likely actual outcomes that your chocies will create.
Shadowy syndicates cutting deals with corrupt regimes do not create an environment of informed consent.
Because it is shedding light on powerful corrupt elites and goes into some detail (given the brevity of the article), without going into wild-eyed conspiracy theories or making half-assed assertions just for the sake of bashing a profit-making corporation.
This sort of transparency is important to a functioning free market economy, especially in resource-rich, socioeconomically underdeveloped economies. Many of these countries don't have a well-developed press to shine the light on the corrupt practices of their government, so it's important and socially useful for the international press to pick up the slack and expose local corruption.
At a simpler level than the other replies, there's a utilitarian argument. There are far more people who lose out from this information inequality than who gain from it.
In South Africa, the ruling party's Youth League, and it's president, Julius Malema keep promoting the nationalization of the country's mines. They recently started threatening to destabilize Botswana, because they claim it is a "tool of the west"' while supporting the Zimbabwe regime.
Although nationalization is totally illogical, and unlikely to succeed (paying for assets at fair value would bankrupt the country, and doing a grab would collapse the country's reputation), they persist in pushing the issue.
Reading this article, the seemingly irrational behavior of Malema and the Youth League seem to make more sense. There is of course, no evidence that shadowy groupings are attempting to ruin South Africa's economic system so they can swoop in and grab the ruins, but reading the article, it doesn't seem particularly far-fetched.
> If that is right, then they would be depriving some of the world’s poorest people of desperately needed wealth.
Really silly to see the Economist, of all places, taking this kind of line.
The inhabitants of these countries lack the technological knowhow to drill for oil and mine for minerals. If you're familiar with the area, it's no joke; we're talking about serious physics, math, and computer science to get oil out of the ground and ship it profitably.
For all kinds of reasons the Chinese have these skills and the Angolans do not. The land will remain absolutely barren if foreigners do not bring their knowhow. Moreover, it is not in China's interest to have an African civil war raging over a possible oil supply as well, so they'll quash stuff like that with authority.
Life around a Chinese-Angolan joint venture will not be paradise relative to a US standard of living. But it will mean jobs, food, and relative political stability, which is a far sight beyond what most other nations in sub-Saharan Africa enjoy.
Really silly to see temphn on Hacker News, of all places, disagreeing with a single line early on in a long article and trying to refute the whole thing without having read the rest of it.
FTA:
The situation in Angola is more complicated, though also disappointing. Chinese contractors have built some housing and railway lines and the projects were at first financed by the syndicate. Signs saying “China International Fund” appeared on construction sites. But in recent years they have been replaced by those of other Chinese companies. According to Western diplomats and Chinese businessmen, the syndicate stopped paying bills for more than eight months in 2007. All work stopped, 2,000 Angolan day labourers were fired on the Benguela railway project and only a Chinese cook remained on duty. Western diplomats suspected the syndicate was banking on being bailed out by the Angolan government, which had staked its legitimacy on infrastructure development. Soon enough, the government issued treasury bonds worth $3.5 billion to finance the projects. Subcontractors are now paid directly by the Angolan state.
The Economist is alerting readers to a syndicate extracting wealth from various African countries (apparently) without delivering the promised benefits to those countries. Nowhere in the article does it try and claim that the idea was inherently wrong in the first place, just the execution.
They're not complaining about foreign joint-ventures. The Economist, of all publications, knows that they're essential to do sophisticated drilling in developing countries.
What they're complaining about is that the proceeds are being directed through private hands, as opposed to the actual governments of the developing countries that need to drill their way out of poverty - for example, how the group is dealing with and paying Zimbabwe's secret police directly for access to the country's diamond mines, as opposed to dealing with the actual government (who may be less friendly).
The government of Zimbabwe is run by Robert Mugabe. It's pretty hard for even a secret police force to be worse than him.
Moreover, the governments of many of these countries are extremely rickety and unstable. They are in the main kleptocracies and certainly not capable of running any indigenous drilling operations.
So, it's not necessarily obvious that involving local politicians/warlords to a greater degree would produce better outcomes.
The point of this article is that the "jobs, food, and relative political stability" haven't materialized. Your last sentence pretty much summarizes the Economist's position and then goes into detail explaining why this is happening in this particular case.
1) The Economist is owned by a corporation, as is the New York Times and the Washington Post. Isn't it interesting how they never run exposes on each other, or that Joe Average company can't get access to their internal documents? This article is unsigned and we have no account of the means by which the article was put together...yet they call for more transparency?
The media's agenda is to sensationalize and sell papers. A demotic tone often helps. But truth usually doesn't.
2) Whenever you see a piece in which A is complaining that B is not paying C enough money, the question always arises: why doesn't A jump into the fray himself and make a better offer to C? The answer usually betrays that A really doesn't care enough about C's plight to quit his job or even fork over $1000. Moreover, and more fundamentally, A does not know enough about the industry to know whether it's possible to pay C more and still make a profit.
Put another way, it is not as easy as it looks to run an international oil drilling company operating in China and Angola! Think about the political risk on both sides. You'll only get the derricks and the surveyors and the hydrologists if you can show this to be more profitable than safer bets like drilling in Norway.
The right role model is Ford: he actually showed that you can get higher productivity and profits by paying workers more. Latter day examples include Price Club and Whole Foods.
But until the Economist actually does something -- and they certainly have the resources -- they have no legitimacy to criticize the guys who actually are providing jobs and hard currency to poor people.
It's like you didn't read the article. Your points aren't relevant here. Party A, using your labels, is speaking up, I'm sure, they just are powerless.
It isn't clear to me that the people with technical know-how deserve nearly all of the revenues from a country's indigenous natural resources. If that were the case, the most rational strategy for these countries would be to leave the oil in the ground until they can develop their own expertise -- they are losing hundreds of billions of dollars to China right now in return for some low-quality jobs and "political stability" (which really means brutal suppression of locals it seems.)
The people who a piece of property should own wants under it. And those willing to invest the capital required to remove it, as well as those who know how to remove it deserve something for their efforts.
The problem in these countries is that people really aren't allowed to keep what they earn and buy and keep land with their own resources.
In the US those who ultimately controlled large oil companies had to buy the mineral rights from thousands of individual land owners.
In many African countries, getting control of the oil requires killing your political opponents.
I'd much rather live where people have rights. Its not perfect and people don't always know what their windfalls may be worth, but its vastly superior to the alternative of deciding who owns what through political means.
Q: What would it take for the Economist to notice rich countries fucking over poor countries for mineral rights?
A: When the rich country is China.
But don't worry soon the Chinese too will figure out how to bribe the pathetic asswhores that call themselves business journalists and we will not have to worry about these stories marring our newspapers.
In fact, it would be nice if our journalists looked into some American corporations the way the Economist investigated Queensway.
Kudos to the Economist for doing reporting the way it should be done. Let's hope they continue pursuing this. This is journalism the way it should be done.