White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Motorcades Are a Symbol of Africa’s Values Deficit

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This week, Washington will seize up. Roads will be closed and traffic will be snarled in maybe the worst tie-ups the city has ever seen, except for those on Sept. 11, 2001.

This will not be because of a national security drill, but because 50 heads of state from Africa will be in town to meet with President Obama – and apparently every one of these leaders will have a motorcade. A motorcade?

The leaders of some of the poorest countries on earth — where starvation prevails – will be riding around Washington in motorcades. This is not just appalling, it is symptomatic of the troubles of Africa.

The peoples of Africa are not monolithic: they are divided by culture, language and religion. But they are united by the throughgoing ineptitude of their leaders; those leaders' love of the trappings of power, including motorcades and grand homes; and a far-reaching sense that the wealth of the nationals they lead is also primarily their own wealth.

Whoever in the Obama administration thought that the visitors should have motorcades not only did a disservice to the workers and residents of Washington, but also to the kind of expectation he needs to instill in African leadership: service, rectitude and real care for their people.

The kleptocracy that has characterized so much post-colonial government in Africa is fed by delusional grandeur, insane egoism and a profound indifference to the people who suffer for want of food, shelter, sanitation, medicine, education and employment. The people of Africa cry out for real leadership in their need.

There is a kind of thinness that Africans suffer that one does not see in Europe or America. I am always struck by this cadaverous appearance of people in Africa; often they have had enough food to stay alive, but just.

Living as we do in a country where obesity is widespread, I shudder at what I see in Africa, which is diverse in so many ways and bound by the same awful bonds: bonds of hunger, bonds of joblessness. They are there to be seen in Senegal or Malawi, Kenya or Ghana, and even in rich South Africa.

Outside of bad government and relentless unemployment — 80 percent, and more in some countries — the other scourge is violence and the promiscuous spread of small arms.

To me this is the most perplexing because when I grew up roaming around what are now Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe, violence was unknown. The prime minister of those countries, which were linked for a decade by the British administration into a federation, Roy Wilensky, drove his own car every day and gave lifts to strangers thumbing a ride. I used to ride with him to school, and later to the newspaper office where I worked.

I can tell you that in giving rides, this prime ministerial chauffeur was color- blind and security blind. Motorcades did not exist and the prime minister lived in a suburban house without so much as a policeman on duty, so much as I am aware. He lived up the street from us.

My youth colored my view of Africa. I see it not as the Dark Continent, but rather as the Light Continent; a place of beauty and talented people.

Obama should tell his African colleagues to forget the trappings of leadership and try the real thing. He should persuade them that Africa’s wealth is in its people, but they will not be free if they grow up in a culture of corruption that is so inhibiting, so draining and so self-defeating.

The symbol of bad government in Africa is the Mercedes-Benz automobile. Dictators and plain incompetents love them. There are jokes in local languages about the “Mercedians,” meaning politicians.

So endemic is the political class in Africa's commitment to this luxury automobile, that Mercedes-Benz is building a plant in South Africa to manufacture the most extravagant of these vehicles, the 12-cylinder S600.

Sadly there is a market in the political hierarchy of Africa as, even sadder, there always is for military equipment. “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrica” was the slogan of the African National Congress. It means “God Bless Africa.” Indeed. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate



 

The Men Who Should Stand in the Dock with Mugabe

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It is easy to work up a head of hate against Robert Mugabe, the cruel president of Zimbabwe. He has destroyed a beautiful country and inflicted untold suffering on his people. He has so mismanaged the economy that the country’s inflation rate is the world’s highest–over 100,000 percent. He has expelled the productive people from the country and others have fled. He has given choice land and accommodations to his family of thugs.

 

More, he is a murderer. In the early part of his reign of terror, he killed tens of thousands of the Matabele people in southern Zimbabwe, around the city of Bulawayo.

 

It is not hard to vilify Mugabe, who may now be at the end of his bloody reign. But there are other guilty men who should be named. They are the de facto co-conspirators up and down the continent of Africa, who lead countries, enjoy influence and have, to a man (the arrival of a woman leader in Liberia is recent), remained silent as Mugabe has become more maniacal.

 

The guiltiest are those in the frontline states that surround land-locked Zimbabwe. They are the leaders of Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia. Each one of them has some of the blood Mugabe has shed on his hands. Because of the silence that they have assiduously maintained, their complicity has been absolute. All four leaders have been the enablers of Mugabe.

 

Each country has suffered from the implosion of Zimbabwe. Each country has felt the pain from the lack of trade; unsatisfied debt; and the surge of people fleeing from the privations of Zimbabwe–once one of the richest countries in Africa, and the breadbasket of the southern region.

 

Botswana, on Zimbabwe’s southwest border, is currently the showplace of Africa. It is a functioning democracy, with a healthy economy based on mining and tourism. But Botswana could have used its economic leverage, as the host of the principle rail line carrying exports out of Zimbabwe into South Africa, and from there to the world, to put pressure on Mugabe. But it did not.

 

To the east, Mozambique hosts many of Zimbabwe’s exports and imports through the port of Beira on the Indian Ocean. If there had been some tightening of this relationship, Mugabe would have listened. Instead, there was silence.

 

Then there is South Africa and President Thabo Mbeki. If there is a judgment day, Mbeki will have much to answer for his connivance in tolerating Mugabe. Mbeki’s guilt extends beyond the suffering of the people to his north to his own people. More than 2 million refugees have fled from Zimbabwe to South Africa, where they have been no more popular than illegal aliens anywhere. The really hapless live on such charity as they can find; while those who are more capable of organization, particularly deserters from the Zimbabwe armed forces, have formed sophisticated criminal gangs, specializing in bank and armored car robbery.

 

Finally, Zambia has shouldered the burden of watching over the giant Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River, which provides electricity to both Zambia and Zimbabwe. Zambia has kept essential goods flowing into Zimbabwe, against the international sanctions; and it has seen its own Victoria Falls tourism plummet because of conditions on the Zimbabwe side of the falls. Yet, Zambia’s leaders have said nothing.

 

If Mugabe is forced from power by the ongoing election, and if he leaves without trying to annul the results of the election, milk and honey will not flow again in the country between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers. Too much has been destroyed in 28 years of his rule. The infrastructure has been destroyed; soil erosion has carried away an incalculable amount of earth from the fragile plain that once produced corn for all of southern Africa; the professional class is scattered around the world, in what they refer to as the Zimbabwe Diaspora; and the people of Zimbabwe have lost confidence in the future. The most optimistic country in Africa has traded hope for fatalism.

 

Assuming Morgan Tsvangirai really has won the election in Zimbabwe, he will have to preside over a massive reconstruction, which will last decades simply to get the country back to where it was when Mugabe destroyed it through racism, megalomania, and economics so primitive that he thought he could print money and it would have value.

 

Tsvangirai will have to turn to the world for economic aid and technical assistance. But he will have to turn to Zimbabweans for goodwill and to resist corruption. And he will have to turn to another silent partner, China, for a better deal on the contracts Mugabe signed with Beijing.

 

Not since Idi Amin was feeding his opponents to the crocodiles has there been such a catastrophic head of state in Africa. And not since Amin’s days, have the leaders of Africa remained so quiet in the face of such palpable evil.