Mugabe is the Mobutu of our time
Marian L. Tupy wishes that Zimbabwe would follow the lead of Botswana, a market democracy. For now, it swelters under the oppressive rule of a tyrant who is wrecking his country.
In her 2000 book In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz, the British author Michela Wrong provides a vivid description of the last years of Mobutu Sese Seko’s rule. Mobutu started as a popular leader who brought stability to the war-scarred Congo in 1965. But his dictatorial streak and megalomania soon got the better of him. He renamed the country Zaire, and instituted a cult of personality and indigenisation policies that saw the country empty of the remnants of her educated white middle-class.
Despite being a self-styled anti-communist, Mobutu undertook ‘the most comprehensive nationalisation seen in Africa’. In 1974 farms, plantations and commercial enterprises were taken from their ‘foreign’ owners — ostensibly to be distributed among the black Zairians. Instead, ‘thousands of businesses... were divided between top [government] officials’. Most of the new proprietors had no idea how to run farms and businesses and quickly ran them into the ground.
Most foreign investors fled and those who stayed behind turned their attention to making quick profits, which they then repatriated overseas. Prior to 1974 the Zairian economy grew at 7 per cent per year. Following nationalisation, the country started on a downward spiral that continues to this day. In 2006, the Congo was the third poorest country in sub-Saharan Africa. Congolese incomes were 23 times lower than those of Seychellois — Africa’s richest people.
The effects of nationalisation extended beyond the immediate economic crisis. ‘The belief that something could be had for nothing... had been endorsed at the very highest level of society. Mobutu and his ministers had plundered mercilessly, and no one had ever been punished.’ Zaire became a kleptocracy and Mobutu became the kleptocrat-in-chief.
The extent of his loot became legendary. In addition to a number of residences in the capital and presidential villas in every major town, Mobutu had a massive palace complex built in his native town of Gbadolite. There he had the airstrip enlarged so as to accommodate the landings of the Concorde planes that he occasionally rented from Air France. Mobutu bought villas on the French Riviera, in the Swiss Alps, Portugal’s Algarve, and no less than nine buildings, including a turreted château, in the upmarket part of Brussels.
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March 21st, 2008 8:24amTo give people an earthy grounding to Britain's complicity in the handing over of S.Rhodesia into the jaws of Marxist Leninist saboteurs. Read: "Bitter Harvest: The Great Betrayal and the Dreadful Aftermath", by Ian Smith. So great was Britain's wish to be rid of this jewel of Africa. So great was the anger of the then PM toward Ian Smith's unilateral declaration of independents. So great was the British torque for appeasement towards black Africa's advancing communists... They gave it away!! There were safeguards but they turned a blind eye. They just couldn't be bothered. The devil in their eyes was the white minority government ... who wanted more time before handing over to majority rule. Who ... we should ask, is the devil now?