How African leaders spend our money - part 2 - by Aidan Hartley - The Spectator

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-thc-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.

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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 fiancées 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 Daimler-Chrysler 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.

How African leaders spend our money - part 1 - by Aidan Hartley - The Spectator

How African leaders spend our money
Spectator, The, Jun 25, 2005 by Hartley, Aidan
Bob Geldof has urged us not to dwell on 'the corruption thing' -but, says Aidan Hartley, corrupt African leaders are using Western aid to buy fleets of Mercedes-Benz cars

'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 Tsetung had 23 Mercs. Today Kim Jong II 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, customised 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.'

A bloody rift 3 : source : Men's Vogue

The Cholmondeley trial has gripped Kenya. The British Spectator, in a recent headline, referred to the case as "a trial that will decide the future of Kenya." It's also one that has resurrected the past. Cholmondeley's great-grandfather—the Lord Delamere affectionately known as "D" in the 1985 film version of Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa—virtually founded Kenya in the wake of the 1901 completion of the Mombasa Railway. The railroad connected the coast with the Great Rift Valley and also helped establish the highland city of Nairobi (the word means "cold water" in Masai). Great farming estates opened up around the railway, bulldozing the Masai herdsmen out of a long corridor of grazing land by treaties in 1904 and 1911. The Masai population, meanwhile, had been decimated by internal warfare and smallpox. This paved the way for a brace of baronial English families to sweep into what was then British East Africa. Along with Delamere, who settled in 1903, came fancifully named friends—Lord Hindlip, Lord Egerton of Tatton, Lord Cardross—looking for agricultural fortunes.

They rarely found them. Instead, decades of hardship, disappointment, and bankruptcy followed, as English farming methods floundered amid African diseases and crop pests. The Delameres, who had sold their ancestral estates in Cheshire to finance their African adventure, didn't find commercial luck until the thirties. This crucible created a distinct breed of men: tough, sometimes embittered entrepreneurs and frontiersmen who were always at war with the rule-loving British bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, a younger, more cosmopolitan crowd emigrated to Kenya, which had been officially established as a British colony in 1920, initiating an influx of flashier money and causing the Rift to be redubbed Happy Valley. Later immortalized by James Fox's 1982 book, White Mischief, the Happy Valley set scandalized Britain with its cocaine habits and wife-swapping. White Mischief was one of those books I devoured at school, sorry that its debauched sangfroid was consigned to the past. It was the brazen, metallic quality of its characters that fascinated me, the fierce, hard edge of their repulsive personalities: the cruelty and neurosis of rootless aristocrats who, in colonial Africa, had lost all their social bearings—or relevance.

The book itself was an investigation of the 1941 murder of the womanizing Lord Erroll, the lover of Diana Broughton, an unstable socialite prematurely married to a morbid middle-aged lord named Jock Delves Broughton. The cuckolded Broughton probably had Erroll shot in revenge on a lonely road outside Nairobi as the self-confessed serial adulterer—who frequently boasted of his marriage-busting prowess—drove home from a night of dancing. Broughton committed suicide in a Liverpool hotel in 1942, and, in 1955, Diana Broughton married Thomas Delamere—Cholmondeley's grandfather. And just as Broughton had been famously acquitted, so Cholmondeley was exonerated of killing Sisina in 2005. Agence France-Presse talked ominously of "colonial-era resentments" being revived. The Times of London ran a piece called "Trigger-Happy Valley." It was guilt by association.

The Cholmondeley case has been widely portrayed as a flashpoint in a racial struggle for land and power, an echo of colonial injustice. "We now know why Robert Mugabe acted the way he did," Kenyan deputy immigration minister Ananias Mwaboza is reported to have said before the Njoya trial began, referring to the president of Zimbabwe's notorious "land reform" campaign to kick whites off their ill-won estates. "Which independence are we talking about if the settlers continue occupying more than half of our lands?" Mwaboza's rhetoric aside, Kenya is quite different from Zimbabwe.