Where the Wealth Has Gone

Léonce Ndikumana was born in Burundi, one of the poorest countries on earth, and became a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts in the United States. For more than twenty years, with his colleague James Boyce, he has done a kind of accounting that almost no one else attempts: measuring the money that leaves African countries without being recorded. The method is painstaking. It compares what a country's trading partners say they paid it with what the country itself recorded, and what it borrowed with what it can show it received. The gaps are the money that vanished. Year after year, Ndikumana has published the totals, and year after year they have grown, until the sum for thirty countries over half a century reached a figure larger than those countries produce in a year. He did not set out to prove that Africa is a victim or that Africans are thieves. He set out to count, and the count has made both of the usual stories impossible to hold alone.

Atlas

Then let us follow the value, as you said. I already know what most people will say. The West took it. The colonial powers took it, the companies took it, the banks took it, and they are still taking it. That is the answer in every bus and every lecture hall. And if I am honest, I believe it too. But I also know that whenever someone says it, someone else answers: stop blaming others, look at our own leaders. So which is it? Did others grow rich from you, or did your own children rob you? I want the truth, even if it hurts both sides. Is that a fair question?

Africa

It is the right question, and the evidence answers it precisely: both, and in amounts that can be measured. The useful question is not which side to blame. It is through which doors the value leaves, who holds each door open, and therefore who can close it. Follow the value with me and you will find five doors. I did not choose the number; the evidence did.

Atlas

Then the first.

Africa

The first door is the one your own family has used. Through it, my people leave.

Training a doctor takes years of a nation's money: its teachers, its hospitals, the patients who allowed students to learn on them. When that doctor leaves, all of that leaves with her. In 2023 the World Health Organization published a list of fifty-five countries whose health workers are so few that they should not be actively recruited by richer nations. Thirty-seven of those fifty-five countries are mine.

Atlas

But you cannot blame her for leaving. She is paid late or not at all. The hospital has no gloves. Her children need schools.

Africa

I blame no one who leaves to use what they have learned. I am telling you what it costs, so that you understand the size of what must be built for her to stay. A nation that cannot keep the people it trained is paying to educate the workforce of other nations. That is the first door, and it is held open from both sides: by the hospitals abroad that recruit, and by the conditions at home that push.

Atlas

The second door. Raw materials. You showed me the shea nut already.

Africa

The shea nut is one tree. Look at a whole crop.

Case: the cocoa bean

Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana together grow more than six of every ten cocoa beans in the world. Almost every bar of chocolate sold anywhere contains their harvest.

Yet the farmers who grow the beans receive only a small fraction of what a chocolate bar is worth: by the most careful estimates, less than seven parts in a hundred. The roasting, grinding, mixing, branding and selling happen mostly elsewhere, and so does most of the money. Both governments have tried to raise the price paid to farmers, and prices have risen and fallen with the world market, but the share of the chain kept at home has barely moved.

The lesson is the same as the shea nut, at the scale of two nations: what leaves raw leaves most of its value behind it.

Atlas

That is the old story of colonialism. They take the raw, they sell us the finished.

Africa

It began in the colonial years. But notice that it did not end with them. Most of my countries have been independent for more than sixty years, and the cocoa still leaves as beans. The door was built by others. Keeping it open has been, at least in part, our own choice, and it is a choice that can be reversed only by building what the shea women lacked: the factories, the finance and the trust to work it at home.

Atlas

The third door.

Africa

The third door is where the money leaves, and it is the one my own children have used most.

In 2015, the African Union adopted a report from a panel chaired by Thabo Mbeki, a former president of South Africa. It found that my countries were losing more than fifty billion dollars every year through illicit financial flows: money hidden through false prices on traded goods, through tax evasion, through corruption. That was more than all the development aid my countries received. The largest share came not from criminals or politicians but from commercial activity: companies moving profits out of sight.

Atlas

Companies, then. Foreign companies.

Africa

Many of them. But now return to the man who opened this conversation. Ndikumana and Boyce estimate that for thirty of my countries, about 2.7 trillion dollars left this way between 1970 and 2022, almost as large as the whole economy of those countries in a single year. And in an earlier study, they found that the private wealth held offshore by people from those countries was far larger than everything those same countries owed to the rest of the world. In that sense, they concluded, my countries are not debtors at all. They are creditors to the world, with their wealth sitting in other people's banks.

Chart: Thirty African countries, 2018: private wealth held offshore compared with external debt, in billions of US dollars (Ndikumana and Boyce, 2021)

Atlas

Wait. If the wealth held abroad is larger than the debt, whose wealth is it?

Africa

Some belongs to foreign companies. But much of it belongs to my own children: officials who stole, businessmen who hid profits, elites who did not trust their own country with their own money. That is why the count made both stories impossible to hold alone. Others built many of the doors. My own children have walked through them carrying my wealth on their backs.

Atlas

Let me put the objection an economist would raise. Some of that money left for reasons that are not theft. A businessman who moves his savings abroad because his currency may collapse or his government may seize his accounts is protecting his family, not robbing his country. Is capital flight not simply rational fear?

Africa

Part of it is, and Ndikumana says so himself. A country that cannot protect property or keep its currency stable will see honest money leave as well as stolen money. But look at what that means. If honest money flees because the country is unsafe for it, then the cure is the same as for stolen money: institutions that can be trusted. Fear and theft leave through the same door, and the same key closes it. And the method of measurement is not fooled by fear: false invoices on trade are not fear, they are concealment, and they account for a large part of the total.

Atlas

And the fourth door?

Africa

The fourth door is the shop. When cocoa leaves as beans and returns as chocolate, when cotton leaves as fibre and returns as clothing, when crude oil leaves the ground and returns as fuel, my people pay twice: once in the low price for what they sold, and again in the high price for what they buy back. Every finished product that crosses my border carries the wages, profits and skills of the place where it was finished.

Case: the refinery

Nigeria has been one of the world's major oil producers for more than fifty years, and for most of that time it imported most of the fuel its own cars, trucks and generators burned. Its crude left raw; its petrol came back refined, at the price of somewhere else's work. That is the fourth door in a single country.

In January 2024, after years of delays, a refinery built by the Nigerian industrialist Aliko Dangote on the edge of Lagos began producing diesel and aviation fuel. It cost about twenty billion dollars, can process 650,000 barrels a day, and is the largest refinery on the continent. By early 2026 it had reached full capacity and was supplying more than half of Nigeria's fuel. Dangote himself called it shameful that a major producer could not refine its own crude.

Whether the refinery delivers everything promised is still being tested, and one refinery does not close a continent's fourth door. But it shows the shape of the key: the value stays where the work is done.

Atlas

And the fifth?

Africa

The fifth is the story, and it is the most difficult to measure. When my countries borrow money, they are usually charged more than countries with similar economies elsewhere. Some argue that much of this extra cost is not justified by the facts, but by how lenders and rating agencies see me. In 2023 the United Nations Development Programme estimated that my countries could save up to seventy-four and a half billion dollars if credit ratings were based on less subjective judgement.

Atlas

There it is. Proof that the world is biased against us.

Africa

Be careful, Atlas. I promised you every door without flinching, and that includes the doors that do not flatter me. In the same year, researchers at the International Monetary Fund studied the same question and reached a different conclusion: once they accounted for how developed a country's financial system is, how transparent its budget is, how large its formal economy is and how strong its institutions are, the extra cost largely disappeared.

Atlas

So one says the world is unfair, and the other says we are the problem.

Africa

One says the story raises the price. The other says the price follows things we can change. Read them together and the lesson is the same: the cost of borrowing falls when budgets are open, institutions are strong and the economy is visible. Those are not things the world can do for me. They are things only my own people can build.

Case: the minister who did not ask for relief

In 2003, Nigeria owed about thirty-six billion dollars abroad and had been refused debt relief for years, partly because it was an oil producer and its creditors did not believe its promises. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, newly appointed as finance minister, met the creditors' finance ministers and did not ask for relief at all. Instead she and her team set about making Nigeria's accounts credible: publishing what the government received and spent, building reserves, and obtaining the country's first sovereign credit rating. In October 2005, the Paris Club of creditor nations agreed to cancel about eighteen billion dollars of Nigeria's debt, the largest write-off in its history, with Nigeria paying off the rest.

The sequence matters. Credibility came first, and relief followed, because the lenders could finally see what they were lending to. It is the cleaner fish on the reef, at the scale of a nation.

Atlas

Why would an open budget lower anything? Lenders are not saints. They do not reward honesty out of kindness.

Africa

No, they reward what they can see. Go down to a coral reef and watch the smallest fish there. Cleaner wrasse set up stations where larger fish come to have parasites picked from their skin. But the cleaners have a temptation: they would rather bite off the protective mucus on their clients' skin, which they prefer to the parasites. Every visit is a choice between serving and cheating. Two marine biologists, Redouan Bshary and Alexandra Grutter, showed that the fish waiting nearby watch how a cleaner treats the client in front of it, and prefer to go to cleaners they have seen behave well. And cleaners that learned they were being watched fed more honestly.

Atlas

So the cleaner that is seen to be honest gets the customers, and the one that knows it is being watched becomes more honest. Is that what you are telling me?

Africa

That is how trust works everywhere life depends on it. Openness is not a gift a country gives to foreign lenders. It is how a country earns trust from outsiders, and it is how a people keeps its own officials honest. A budget that can be read is a reef where everyone can watch the cleaner.

Atlas

Then let me put it all together, and tell me if I have it right. Others have grown rich from you: through the doctors they recruit, through the beans they process, through the profits companies hide and through the price they charge for lending. But our own leaders and elites have hidden wealth abroad, kept the doors open and failed to build what would make our people stay and our crops worth more. Is that what you are telling me?

Africa

That is what the count tells both of us. And now notice what follows from it. If the doors were built only by others, we could do nothing but complain. If they were opened only by us, we could do nothing but feel ashamed. Because both are true, every door has a key, and many of those keys are already in African hands: keeping skilled people, working the crops at home, closing the hidden channels for money, buying from each other, and building the institutions that lower the price of the story.

Atlas

You make it sound simple.

Africa

It is not simple. It is clear. Those are different things. A clear path can still be steep.

Atlas

Then show me the keys. Not in theory. Show me where they have already turned.