You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [59]
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.
You Have How Many Wives?
SWAZILAND 2001
While we’re on the subject of Swaziland, let us 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 seventeen-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 sixty 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?
You Put the Money Where?
KENYA, 1977–PRESENT
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, Mobutu’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 1978 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 gas station of a certain U.S./European petroleum company 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.
You Set Up What on an Island?
IDI AMIN, UGANDA, 1969
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 — twenty-three-acre Mukusu