Efficiencies on the Dark Continent,
or, Darwin Was Wrong
Africa is a big continent, so big that we can’t confine this chapter to a single story or example. Bear with us.
Inefficiency is nothing new to Africa. That said, the fact remains that the Dark Continent is constantly finding new and better ways to be inefficient.
ONE OF OUR NAVIES IS MISSING
The most recent incident occurred in the fall of 2002, when an African nation lost its navy. Okay, it was a navy of just one ship, but still…
“The situation is absolutely under control,” Transport Minister Ephraem Magagula assured the Swaziland parliament in Mbabane, according to the Johannesburg Star. “Our nation’s navy is perfectly safe. We just don’t know where it is, that’s all.” The navy in question was the landlocked country’s only ship, the Swazimar. That’s right—a navy of one ship. ship. (Well, let’s be reasonable. Just how many naval vessels does a tiny landlocked country need anyway?)
Explained Magagula: “We believe it is at sea somewhere. We did send a team of men to look for it, but there was a problem with drink and they failed to find it, and so, technically, yes, it’s temporarily lost. But I categorically reject all suggestions of incompetence on the part of this government. The Swazimar is a big ship painted in the sort of nice bright colors you can see at night. Mark my words, it will turn up. The right honorable gentleman opposite is a very naughty man, and he will laugh on the other side of his face when my ship comes in.”
When last we heard, Swaziland was still looking for its navy.
THE PUSSYCAT OF SOUTHERN AFRICA
While we’re on the subject of Swaziland, let’s consider young King Mswati II—one of the few absolute monarchs left anywhere in the world.
King Mswati is the marrying kind. He recently took his tenth wife, a 17-year-old schoolgirl. Of course, Mswati has quite a way to go to match his daddy, old King Sobhuza II, who died in 1986. (Sobhuza had 60 wives and made sure he could keep them by abolishing the constitution and all representative forms of government in Swaziland.)
Mswati realized that marrying so many women in this day and age might not sit well with his subjects, so he issued a degree that gave him total censorship over all the media in his country, on the not-unreasonable assumption that you can’t get mad if you don’t know what’s going on.
Then, since he had so many wives to transport on state visits to the far reaches of his country (which happens to be considerably smaller than Florida), Mswati contracted to buy a $50 million private jet while his nation of a million people is short on food and living on a per capita average of less than a dollar a day.
Or, as Mel Brooks says, “It’s good to be the king!”
(And it’s getting better. He just got engaged again.)
So how does the Studmuffin of Swaziland stack up against some of the recent African heads of state?
IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Well, the champ is the late Joseph Mobutu (who changed his name to Mobutu Sese Seku), dictator (in Africa the term is President-For-Life) of Zaire. Mobuto came to power at the height of the cold war, put his loyalty up for auction, and was purchased by the West. Over the years the United States and its allies gave Zaire $10 billion in aid. At the time of his death, Mobuto’s Swiss bank accounts and European real estate holdings were estimated to be worth more than $9 billion.
Another African leader who won’t be going hungry soon is Daniel arap Moi, President of Kenya from 1977 until 2003. He’d been a schoolteacher before Jomo Kenyatta tapped him as his vice president, and he succeeded to the presidency shortly thereafter. With no savings, and on the minimal salary paid to Kenya’s president, Moi managed to acquire the ownership of every Mobil gas station in Kenya (renamed Kobil gas stations), every Mercedes taxi in Nairobi and Mombasa, the entire Air Kenya fleet of DC-3 airplanes, and a few hundred thousand acres of prime farmland in Kenya’s White Highlands. The only conclusion: he must have brown-bagged a lot of lunches.
But never let it be said that every African dictator takes it all with him. When the Emperor Bokassa was being deposed in the Central African Republic, a mere handful of years after the French donated some $25 million to his Ascendancy Ceremony, one of his last imperial acts was to stop by the nation’s treasury and set it afire.
INVESTING IN AFRICAN REAL ESTATE
King Mswati uses his absolute rule for self-indulgence. Nothing unusual about that; being the top dog has always been a great way to get girls…literally, in his case.
But Uganda’s Idi Amin, who just died in exile in Saudi Arabia, was a cat of a different stripe.
Being a total dictator, self-indulgent, and evil to boot, can start to wear on the old nerves. You need a holiday retreat of some sort. Old Idi had his—23-acre Mukusu Island on beautiful Lake Victoria. There Idi whiled away many a pleasant afternoon indulging in his hobby of torturing a wide variety of victims and feeding them to the crocodiles.
Today, over twenty years after the end of Idi Amin’s genocidal dictatorship, this island still bears the scars of his lazy afternoons there. You might stop by it sometime: a great little fixer-upper, with cattle prods, chains, and crocodiles included. (Idi called it Paradise Island—perhaps because of the many people he and the crocs dispatched to Paradise while he was there.)
Amin had some other little problems in the area of civilized behavior. It’s said on good authority that he ate at least one of his infant sons. He declared that Adolf Hitler was his hero and erected a statue of him in the capital city of Kampala. Math was never his strong suit, and he simply never understood why he couldn’t just print more money when he needed it. So print it he did—and there came a day when a loaf of bread cost in excess of a million Ugandan shillings.
He remained convinced (deluded is probably a more accurate word) that his people wanted him back, and he left his Saudi reservation a few years ago, certain they were ready to roll out a red, if not bloodstained, carpet for him. He got as far as the Zaire-Uganda border when he was recognized and refused entry.
THERE WERE PROBLEMS BEFORE IDI
Ruling Uganda stupidly didn’t begin with Idi Amin, who took over in 1969. A few years earlier, the country was having a problem with tsetse flies.
Now, the tsetse fly tends to live on herbivores, usually wild ones—but if you bring enough cattle into an area, the tsetse isn’t all that selective, and will just as happily live, breed and dine on domestic cattle. The problem is, wild game has a built-in immunity to the tsetse fly, and domestic animals don’t.
Now, in any reasonable society, if your cattle were infested with tsetse flies, you’d spray heavily with DDT or something similar, and of course you’d begin dipping your livestock regularly.
But this was Uganda. Let us, they reasoned, get rid of the wildlife, and then the tsetse flies will have nowhere to go.
So they declared an unlimited open season on their game. Hunters came from all over. It’s estimated that half a million animals were killed.
The result?
Well, some of the wounded game animals ran a thousand miles before dying, thus introducing their tsetse flies to areas that had never known them before. As for the bulk of the tsetse population, it moved lock, stock and barrel to the domestic livestock without losing a beat.
SPORTS MEDICINE
Being slow to pay your witch doctor is just about as stupid as living any place that Idi Amin would call Paradise Island. But a government minister in the Ivory Coast did just that. (Well, let’s be fair. Maybe his Blue Cross didn’t cover it.)
It seems that more than a decade after the Ivory Coast’s soccer team managed its only African Nations Cup win, the local witch doctors were finally paid. Why? Because they are convinced they helped win the trophy by means of their professional services.
Back in 1992 the Minister of Sport decided to provide the national team with a bit of an edge and hired the witch doctors as spiritual consultants. Named the Elephants, the team managed a narrow win during a penalty shootout in Senegal.
Fine so far—but then the sports minister kinda sorta forgot to pay the bill. The witch doctors, who live in the village of Akradio, took this oversight rather poorly. They immediately put a hex on the team. And their magic worked again—no wins for the next ten years!
Finally bowing to pressure from disappointed fans, the Minister, one Moise Lida Kouassi, decided it was time to pay up. He offered humble apologies, a bottle of liquor, and two thousand dollars to the witch doctors.
There will be two signs by which we’ll know if Kouassi’s capitulation worked: the first will be that the Elephants win again; the second will be that his head doesn’t fall off. The current odds are 6-to-5, pick ’em.
THE MOST RECENT COLONIAL WAR
Most people you talk to (except for Minister Kouassi of the Ivory Coast, who any moment now may find himself missing a head to talk with) will tell you that the age of colonialism is over, that all of Africa is independent now.
Not so. One of the oldest European colonial powers, Spain, still has several African possessions. In fact, you may recall a recent news article which reported that five Moroccan soldiers captured a small rock of an island claimed by Spain. The next day, nine Spanish troops recaptured it, thus ending the latest colonial war in Africa.
Obviously, armies have downsized since a force of 60 Tanzanian soldiers overthrew the government of the Seychelles back in 1977.
AFRICAN MATH
“I have promised to keep his identity confidential,” Jack Maxim, a spokesman for the Sandton Sun Hotel in Johannesburg, told the Cape Times, “but I can confirm that he is no longer in our employment.
“We asked him to clean the lifts and he spent four days on the job. When I asked him why, he replied: ‘Well, there are forty of them, two on each floor, and sometimes some of them aren’t there.’ Eventually we realized that he thought each floor had a different lift, and he’d cleaned the same two twelve times. We had to let him go. I understand he is now working for GE.”
With that kind of math being exported to GE, heaven help our next generation of space shuttles.
SO YOU’RE UNHAPPY WITH THE WAY WE RUN OUR AIRPORTS?
We’ll admit that some of the cases we’ve discussed will stretch your credulity. Not this one. This one will throw it right out the window. Of an airplane. That isn’t going anywhere. In Kenya.
“What’s all the fuss about?” Weseka Sambu demanded at a hastily-convened news conference at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi. “A technical hitch like this could have happened anywhere in the world. You people are not patriots. You just want to cause trouble.”
So what was Sambu’s problem?
He is a spokesman for Kenya Airways, and he was explaining why a flight that was to originate in Kisumu, stop in Nairobi, and then continue on to Berlin, Germany just a tad behind schedule.
It all began when 42 passengers boarded the plane, ready to fly to Nairobi, when the pilot noticed that one of the tires had gone flat.
That could happen anywhere. But what came next could only happen in Africa.
First problem: Kenya Airways didn’t have a spare tire at Kisumu.
Second problem: the airport’s nitrogen canister was empty, so they decided to take the tire to a local gas station for repairs.
Third problem: someone had stolen the jack and they couldn’t get the wheel off—so they tried to inflate the tire with a bicycle pump.
Fourth problem: the bicycle pump didn’t work, so the pilot climbed out of the plane and tried to blow into the valve with his mouth.
Fifth problem: the pilot passed out from his efforts—and the tire remained flat. For all we know, it’s still flat as we write these words.
“When I announced that the flight had to be abandoned,” said Sambu, “one of the passengers, a Mr. Mutu, suddenly struck me about the face with a life-jacket whistle and said we were a national disgrace. I told him he was being ridiculous and that there would be another flight in a fortnight. And in the meantime, he would be able to enjoy the scenery around Kisumu, albeit at his own expense.”
Okay, now tell us how much you resent the security lines at your local airport.
PROJECTS
The Italians spent $300 million building roads in Somalia. What’s peculiar about that? At the time, it came to more than $200,000 per vehicle.
In 1990, Lilongwe, the capital city of Malawi, had a state of the art television broadcast tower. What’s unusual about that? Except for the Capital Hotel in Lilongwe, the Mount Soche hotel in Blantyre, and the various palaces of President-For-Life Hastings Banda, there were less than 50 television sets in the country.
President Omar Bongo of Gabon talked the French into spending more than half a billion dollars building the most ambitious railroad on the continent. It required some 50 bridges, made with the finest hardwood, each spanning enormous canyons, but eventually it was done. What’s unusual about that? Gabon’s only export, the only thing they would ship to the coast aboard their state-of-the-art train, was hardwood; they used it all up building the railroad.
Remember our old pal, the deposed Emperor Bokassa? Everything was going well for him until he decided to build a factory that made uniforms for the local schoolchildren. And since it was his idea, and he was the Emperor, of course he owned it. What’s unusual about that? Well, the average outfit cost $100, and the average family earned about $150 a year, so they were understandably reluctant to purchase the outfits. Then Bokassa passed a law—when you’re the Emperor passing laws is pretty easy—making it mandatory that all schoolchildren wore his company’s outfits. That’s when the students, most of them not yet adolescents, marched on the capital in protest. And that’s when Bokassa decided they were an irritant and ordered them shot. And that was the beginning of the end for Bokassa.
The Ivory Coast’s late President-For-Life Houphouet-Boigny, ruling a country that was saddled with one of Africa’s biggest per-capita debts, built a huge cathedral in the capital of Abidjan. He was so pleased with it that, while rescheduling the country’s debt payments, he decided to build the world’s biggest church, and not in Abidjan, but in the little village of Yamoussoukro.
The structure, which was designed to dwarf St. Peter’s basilica in Rome, was about halfway up when it was finally shown off to foreign journalists in 1987. An American writer asked if it might be considered folly to build the world’s biggest church in the middle of the African bush, especially when so many of the people were hungry. The guide, who had been well-schooled by the 150 Frenchmen who were getting rich off the project, replied, “Don’t you think there were starving and homeless people when the cornerstone was laid for Notre Dame?” End of discussion.
ECOLOGY, AFRICAN STYLE
The Nile perch sometimes grows to 300 pounds, and inhabits Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. Why not, reasoned the government, capture some young ones and put them into Lake Tanganyika, the largest fresh-water lake on the continent, and let them breed? Think of how much protein we can pull out of the lake in a few years to feed our hungry masses.
The Nile perch proceeded to eat almost everything else in the lake. They themselves made slow, easy targets for the thousands of crocodiles. It’ll be years before the last of them is dead and the lake’s balance is restored.
The same geniuses put beautiful, flowering water hyacinths into Kenya’s Lake Naivasha. Why not? They were lovely, and the hippos liked eating them.
But they multiplied a lot faster than the lake’s hippos, and on any given day 40% to 50% of the lake’s surface is covered by the things.
You can go too far the other direction. Botswana has done such a splendid job of protecting its elephant population—and word went out on the elephant grapevine, because elephants who were being decimated by poachers in Angola, Zimbabwe and Zambia migrated there—that suddenly what Botswana has is a lot of starving elephants. The Chobe National Park, which can reasonably support about 18,000 to 22,000, currently has 60,000 and the number is growing as the food supply is vanishing. But because Botswana is a signatory to the CITES agreement—a total continent-wide ban on ivory, created because other countries couldn’t control their poachers—they cannot even cull their own herds and use the proceeds from the ivory to relocate some of the hungrier survivors.
SEE? IT’S NOT JUST MUGABE
It’s generally considered that, after two decades in office, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has lost his sanity. It took him less than three years to bankrupt the country, turn a healthy populace into an army of starving beggars, and generally make himself a pariah among civilized leaders.
So why didn’t the people rise up and throw him out of office?
Well, there are many reasons, including his death squads, but one reason no one has suggested to date is that it’s harder to tell a Zimbabwe madman than you think.
Consider this item from a Bulawayo newspaper:
“While transporting mental patients from Harare to Bulawayo, the bus driver stopped at a roadside shebeen (beer hall) for a few beers. When he got back to his vehicle, he found it empty, with the 20 patients nowhere to be seen. Realizing the trouble he was in if the truth were uncovered, he halted his vehicle at the next bus stop and offered lifts to those in the queue. Letting 20 people board the bus, he then shut the doors and drove straight to the Bulawayo Mental Hospital, where he hastily handed over his ‘charges,’ warning the nurses that they were particularly excitable.
“Excitable was an understatement. Staff removed the furious passengers; it was three days later that suspicions were roused by the consistency of stories from the 20. As for the real patients: nothing more has been heard of them and they have apparently blended comfortably back into Zimbabwean society…”
WHAT’S NEXT?
It’s hard to say. But for every Shaka Zulu, who began with a village the size of a football field and wound up with an empire three times the size of France, there’s an Idi Amin, who began with a country like Uganda and wound up confined in a small house thousands of miles away. For every Albert Schweitzer who devotes his life to truth, there’s a South African president who tells the press that AIDS is a capitalist myth. For every Jomo Kenyatta who outlaws hunting, there’s likely to be a game department officer with a unique way of eradicating tsetse flies.
But they do keep things interesting, don’t they?