How African leaders spend our money - part 4 - by Aidan Hartley - The Spectator

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 Mugabc's motorcade 'Bob and the Wallers' 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 Biaise 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.