"
WABENZI "
'Oh Lord,
won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz,' prayed Janis Joplin, and the
Lord obliged. With or without divine intervention, the late Pope
had one. So does the Queen. Erich Honecker hunted at night by
dazzling the deer in his Mercedes jeep's headlights until he got
close enough to blow them away. Mao Tse-tung had 23 Mercs. Today
Kim Jong Il owns dozens, all filled to the gunwales with imported
Hennessy's cognac. Hitler, Franco, Hirohito, Tito, the Shah,
Ceausescu, Pinochet, Somoza - they all swore by Mercedes. Saddam
Hussein liked them so much he probably had shares in the company.
Today, though, there is one man who is doing more than the Lord
himself to buy a Mercedes-Benz for the leading creeps of the
world. That man is of course Bob Geldof, the spur to our global
conscience. Africa's leaders cannot wait for the G8 leaders -
hectored by Bob and Live 8 into bracelet-wearing submission to
double aid and forgive the continent's debts. They know that such
acts of generosity will finance their future purchases of very
swish, customized Mercedes-Benz cars, while 315 million poor
Africans stay without shoes and Western taxpayers get by with
Hondas. This is the way it goes with the WaBenzi, a Swahili term
for the Big Men of Africa.
The legacy of colonialism is a continent carved up by arbitrary
frontiers into 50-odd states. But the WaBenzi are a
transcontinental tribe who have been committing grand theft auto
on the dusty, potholed roads of Africa ever since they hijacked
freedom in the 1960s. After joyriding their way through six
Marshall Plans' worth of aid Africa is poorer today than 25 years
ago; and now the WaBenzi want more.
Let us take Zimbabwe, where millions of people are starving, 3,000
die weekly of Aids and life expectancy has fallen to 35 years. In
2005 Britain will give Zimbabwe £30 million in aid, making it one
of the three biggest donors. The government will say this money
funds emergency relief. Try telling that to the hordes of people
whose homes have been burned down and bulldozed in recent weeks.
Giving corrupt governments money frees up budgets to squander on
cars.
As an example of hypocrisy, it is hard to beat the call for 'clean
leadership' in Comrade Robert Mugabe's recent address to Zanu-PF's
Central Committee. The old dictator condemns:
'Arrogant flamboyance and wastefulness: a dozen Mercedes-Benz cars
to one life, hideously huge residences, strange appetites that can
only be appeased by foreign dishes; runaway taste for foreign
lifestyles, including sporting fixtures, add to it high immorality
and lust.'
He is clearly talking about the WaBenzi, and their preferred
version of the marque, the S600L, a long-wheelbase limo with a
monstrous 7.3-litre V12 twin-turbo-charged engine. It's as
powerful as a Ferrari and 21 feet long. Basic price £93,090, but
extras could be £250,000 more.
And who is the most notorious Zimbabwean owner of an S600L? Robert
Mugabe, of course. Mugabe's was custom-built in Germany and
armoured to a 'B7 Dragunov standard' so that it can withstand
AK-47 bullets, grenades and landmines. It is fitted with CD
player, movies, internet and anti-bugging devices. At five tons it
does about two kilometres per litre of fuel. It has to be followed
by a tanker of petrol in a country running on empty. Mugabe has
purchased a carpool of dozens of lesser Mercedes S320s and E240s
for his wife, vice-presidents and ministers.
You may wonder why men like Mugabe did not go for Rolls-Royce,
Bentley or Jaguar. The answer should be obvious: whatever their
other disadvantages, British cars were associated with
imperialism. Look at history and you see that up to the 1960s
Mercedes-Benz was ticking along, doing nothing special. Then at
about the same time as the 'Wind of Change' swept Africa, Mercedes
produced the stretch 600 Pullman, a six-door behemoth with a
6.3-litre V8 engine. For Africa's new top dogs, it was love at
first sight. The WaBenzi were born. Idi Amin snapped up three,
Bokassa more when he crowned himself emperor in central Africa.
Zaire's Sese Seko Mobutu bought so many that he kept six for his
summerhouse on Lake Kivu alone. Liberia's Sergeant Samuel Doe
splurged on 60.
Since those days Africa has been through 186 coups, 26 wars and
seven million dead, and the Mercedes has been ideal - both for
conveying dignity and for getting out of trouble. I wondered what
it was like to drive the old Pullman, so I asked veteran
trans-Africa rally driver Anthony Cazalet. 'You don't drive it,
your chauffeur does,' he said. 'Look, it's a Queen Mum of a car:
gentle, smooth, quiet; growls when necessary. Huge amounts of
legroom and enormous seats for very big
bottoms.' Cazalet recalls taking a friend's Pullman for a spin in
Nairobi. 'I floored the throttle and the old girl pulled up her
skirt and let rip. Everybody in the car was screaming.'
Of course, not all Africans who own Mercedes cars are WaBenzi and
nor am I suggesting DaimlerChrysler are at fault in any way.
Thanks in large part to anti-state corruption drives by the World
Bank, a middle class of hard-working, talented entrepreneurs has
emerged in Africa in the last two decades. Africa's future depends
on these young entrepreneurs, and they want to buy quality cars
for the same reason successful Westerners do. As one Kampala
businessman says, 'I am a serious person and I want that to be
portrayed even through the car I drive.' Free trade for Africa
would certainly create more Mercedes-Benz owners. The WaBenzi, by
the way, loathe free trade. Reduced bureaucracy means less
opportunity for graft, and the traditional way of getting someone
else to buy your German-built machine.
Take, for example, Malawi's 'Benz Aid' scandal. In the year 2000
Bakili Muluzi was hailed as a paragon of African 'good governance'
following the demise of Life President Hastings Kamuzu Banda. The
Economist rated Blantyre as the best city to live in in the world.
Britain promised to increase its aid from £30.8 million to £52.4
million in a single year specifically to help the 65 per cent of
Malawians existing on less than 50 pence a day. Malawi's
government celebrated by purchasing 39 top-of-the-range S-class
Mercedes at a cost of £1.7 million. In the furore that followed,
Clare Short, then international development secretary, ruled out a
ban on aid to Malawi, explaining that the money used for the car
purchases had not been skimmed off British aid but some
other donor's.
Last year King Mswati III of Swaziland went against the grain. He
passed over Mercedes and went for a £264,000 Maybach 62 for
himself plus a fleet of BMWs for each of his 10 wives and three
virginal fiancιes selected annually at the football stadium 'dance
of the impalas'. Imagine if he continues buying BMW for his wives;
his dad collected 50 spouses and 350 kids. In May southern
Africa's Mr Toad changed his mind about Mercedes and roared up to
his rubber-stamp parliament in a new S600L limo. The total bill
for his car purchases alone will be about £750,000, or three
quarters of the annual figure for British assistance. Of the £14
million Swaziland gets in foreign aid, £9 million goes on the
king's balls, picnics and parties and cars. Yet 70 per cent of
Swazis languish in absolute poverty and four out of ten have
HIV/Aids, the highest rate in the world.
No corner of Africa escapes the WaBenzi effect, including South
Africa. Mercedes gifted Nelson Mandela one, and he accepted it. In
2001 the ANC chief whip Tony Yengeni was charged and later jailed
for accepting a Mercedes ML320 at a 48 per cent discount in return
for lobbying on behalf of DaimlerChrysler companies in the
European Aeronautic Defence and Space consortium (Eads). At the
time Eads was
bidding for huge defence contracts, and Mercedes-Benz unilaterally
admitted making dozens of cars available at discount prices. Some
32 officials, including the national defence chief General Siphiwe
Nyanda, benefited. Most shocking of all, according to local press
reports, President Thabo Mbeki himself had been given an S600L
armoured limousine for a 'test drive'. He kept it for a full six
months, only handing it back in March 2001, just as the Yengeni
scandal broke.
'Why target Yengeni alone?' the opposition's Bantu Holomisa said at
the time. 'The President himself test-drove a similar one for six
months.' The following year Muammar Gaddafi gave Mbeki an S600L as
a present. ANC officials claimed the President was 'truly
embarrassed', but did he refuse the gift?
One of the most flagrant abuses of 'good governance' in Africa
today is occurring in Kenya original home of the WaBenzi. After
decades of dictatorship voters in December 2002 swept Mwai Kibaki
to power at the head of his NARC rainbow coalition on an
anti-corruption ticket. 'Corruption will now cease to be a way of
life in
Kenya,' Kibaki promised. The very first law Kibaki's parliament
passed rewarded
politicians with a 172 per cent salary increase. MPs' take-home
pay is now about £65,000 per annum (compared with a British MP's
£57,485 gross) and the Kenyan MPs' fat package of allowances
includes a £23,600 grant to buy a duty-free car, together with a
monthly £535 fuel and maintenance allowance.
These grants fall way short of what many politicians actually spend
on their official and private cars, Kibaki's ministers especially.
Soon after taking power the government spurned its 'corrupt'
predecessors' Mercedes E220 models and upgraded with the purchase
of 32 new vehicles for top officials, including seven for the
Office of
the President. Most of these were new E240s, while the minister in
charge of Kenya's
dilapidated roads, Raila Odinga, went for a customised S500 at a
probable cost of £100,000. Not to be outdone, Kibaki got himself
you guessed it the S600L limousine.
How can Kibaki spend up to £350,000 on a car when Kenyans' average
annual per capita income is £210 less than the cost of a box of
decent cigars? His purchase is legal because parliament approved
it, but does that make it acceptable when Kenya is on the bones of
its arse and demanding more aid?
Ministers say they should be paid so well because it stops them
taking bribes. But the British High Commissioner to Nairobi, Sir
Edward Clay, last year denounced the ruling 'Mount Kenya Mafia' as
gluttons who were so overfed they left the signs of their theft in
their trail as clearly as if they had puked up. He said, 'The
evidence of corruption in Kenya [amounts to] vomit, not just on
the shoes of donors
but also all over the shoes of Kenyans ...and the feet of those
who can't afford shoes.'
In February this year Clay boldly produced another set of
accusations, alluding to the fact that about £550 million has been
stolen since Kibaki's government assumed power two years ago.
Kenyan ministers responded by accusing the British envoy of being
a white colonialist whom nobody need listen to. Britain is the
nasty former colonial power that has just increased aid massively
in 200506, from £30.5 million to
£50 million. Despite the corruption alarm bells going off in
Kenya, Blair's government has ruled out suspending aid.
Does any of this sound familiar? That's right: by deploying the
WaBenzi co-efficient you can see that more aid equals more
Mercedes-Benzes. Take a look at Kenya's 200506 budget, read out
by finance minister David Mwiraria to a cheering parliament in
Nairobi on 8 June. According to the local Daily Nation, the
government has allocated £3 million for the purchase of a fleet of
new vehicles for the Office of the President. A further £2.9
million has been set aside for the maintenance of the
existing car-pool of vehicles. One has to wonder if this
expenditure of nearly £6 million, no doubt a lot of it on
Mercedes-Benzes and far in excess of the sums involved in Malawi's
'Benz Aid' scandal, has anything to do with the increased aid
supply.
Here's how the WaBenzi get around. Nigeria's Olusegun Obasanjo and
Libya's Muammar Gaddafi have motorcades that can extend a mile
long. At the very minimum an African president needs at least 30
cars: the S600L for himself, perhaps a couple more identical
vehicles to confuse assassins, outriders, ministers, yes-men and
chase cars bristling with guns. Snarling police in advance
vehicles force you
off the road up to an hour before the big man zooms past. In
Kenya, I often wonder how much it all costs, to make the capital
city, Nairobi, grind to a halt. When almost the entire city police
force is ordered to line the roads from State House to the
airport, how many rapes, murders and robberies are perpetrated in
the slums?
When you hear Him coming, the back of your neck tingles as the
tension mounts. Zimbabweans call Mugabe's motorcade 'Bob and the
Wailers' on account of the blaring sirens and flashing lights. Woe
betide you if you get in the way. Early this year the Tanzanian
president Benjamin Mkapa visited Mugabe, who picked him up in the
five-ton Mercedes and was heading back to the palace when a lowly
motorist
stopped too close to the motorcade's path. In Zimbabwe it is an
imprisonable offence to make rude comments or gestures in 'view or
hearing of the state motorcade'. This man had done neither, but
police surrounded him, viciously beat him and then dragged him
away.
Apart from shielding his friend Mugabe from all criticism, Mkapa is
one of Blair's Commissioners for Africa. Mkapa, you might recall,
was the president whose police killed a lot of people around the
rigged elections in Zanzibar. Mkapa's sidekick politician Salmin
Amour allegedly spent £160,000 on yup a Mercedes S600L.
When he's at home Mkapa has his own motorcade, which in the last
five years has been involved in three separate road accidents in
which 22 people have died (including a child of three) and 47
others have been seriously injured. Most were pedestrians. Mkapa
escaped this road slaughter without a scratch to himself, but no
wonder
he often chooses to fly in the £15-million presidential jet he
used state coffers to buy
in 2002. A jet? Not even Blair has his own jet, but Mkapa is just
about to have his entire misruled country's debt forgiven.
Who benefits from aid? Germany gives the East African Union E8
million for the regional organisation's secretariat in Arusha
and the car park is filled with Mercedes-Benzes. Is Germany giving
the money just so that it can get it back while giving a bunch of
WaBenzi in suits their sets of wheels?
Aid has not worked. A Merrill Lynch report estimates there are
100,000 Africans today who own £380 billion in wealth. At the same
time more than 300 million other Africans live on 50 pence a day.
Forget about the gap between north and south. The wealth gap
within countries like Kenya is far, far worse than in any other
part of the globe.
It doesn't have to be like this. Africans themselves have always
seen the WaBenzi as the symbol of Africa's ills. The first martyr
for the cause was Thomas Sankara, the Burkina Faso president who
forced his ministers to swap their Mercedes for Renault 5s. He
also made them go on runs. Sankara was overthrown and executed in
1987 by
Blaise Campaore, who remains in power today. In 2001 Sam Nujoma of
Namibia traded in his Mercedes for a Volvo. He said if all
ministers did likewise it would save £550,000 annually. 'We are
servants of the Namibian people,' he said. 'It is high time that
we start behaving as such.' What a party-pooper at least he was
until this year, when as part of his huge retirement package he
got a S500 worth £80,000 plus two other cars. In 2002 Zambia's
President Levy Mwanawasa went to the airport in a public bus and
urged his ministers to do the same. Last year the opposition
Ghanaian politician Dr Edward Nasigre Mahama proposed selling
President
John Kufuor's Mercedes to pay for children's education.
'Get off the corruption thing,' says Bob Geldof. The point is that
nobody has got on to it properly yet. Aid-giving nations pretend
to be tough on corruption, while African leaders pretend to
change. Aid bureaucrats care less about financial probity than the
press releases claiming that an economy is on a positive reform
track. They are not helping Africa's young entrepreneurs. By
throwing fiscal discipline to the wind and shovelling aid at
Africa, the international bureaucrats will fuel a new renaissance
in corruption.
Meanwhile, NGOs refuse to focus on corruption because it's simply
not a priority for them. They blame corruption on Western
multinationals. Charities are ideological museums stuffed with
socialists and anti-globalisation activists. They loathe private
enterprise. I sometimes wonder if they would prefer to see
Africans stay poor so that aid workers could carry on doing good
works for them.
Western pundits say the WaBenzi still exist because African culture
is inherently sick, that black Africans can't help but admire the
Big Men. This does ordinary Africans an injustice. The West needs
to help them get better leaders before it increases aid. Make the
WaBenzi declare their wealth to their electorates and donors. Name
and shame those who drive expensive cars while their people
starve.
Encourage policies that will create wealth so that the only
Africans buying Mercedes-Benzes are honest men and women. Unless
this happens Africa's new aid package will not alleviate poverty,
disease and ignorance. What it will definitely mean is more flashy
limousines.
Aidan Hartley is author of The Zanzibar Chest.
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