The ones who spent it

The Heir

Count, then. I want the number.

Africa

Begin with the one you know. Mobutu Sese Seko, Congo, which he renamed Zaire. In power from 1965 to 1997, thirty-two years. The country under him held more copper, cobalt and diamonds than almost any on earth. When he fled in 1997, its roads had rotted to the point where a country the size of Western Europe had fewer kilometres of paved road than it had at independence. His personal fortune was estimated at four to five billion dollars, with palaces in Switzerland, France, and a marble one carved into the jungle at Gbadolite, with an airstrip long enough for Concorde, which he chartered. The average Congolese lived on less than a dollar a day throughout.

The Heir

Idi Amin.

Africa

Uganda, 1971 to 1979. Eight years. Between a hundred thousand and three hundred thousand of his own people killed; the exact number was never counted, which is itself the point. He expelled fifty thousand Asian Ugandans in ninety days in 1972 and gave their businesses to his soldiers, who ran them into the ground within a year. The country's exports collapsed by two-thirds.

The Heir

Bokassa.

Africa

Central African Republic. In December 1977 he crowned himself emperor in a ceremony modelled on Napoleon's, with a crown of diamonds and a two-tonne gilded throne shaped like an eagle. It cost about twenty million dollars, roughly a third of the national budget that year, in one of the ten poorest countries in the world. France paid for part of it. Two years later France removed him.

The Heir

Nigeria.

Africa

Sani Abacha, 1993 to 1998. Five years. Between three and five billion dollars moved out of the central bank to accounts in London, Zurich, Jersey and elsewhere, some of it in cash, in trucks. Nigeria has spent twenty-five years recovering it, a few hundred million at a time, and is still not finished. He was one of eight military rulers of Nigeria between 1966 and 1999.

The Heir

Ethiopia. Somalia.

Africa

Mengistu Haile Mariam, Ethiopia, 1974 to 1991. The Red Terror of 1977 and 1978 killed tens of thousands in Addis Ababa alone, many of them students your age, whose families were then charged for the bullets. The famine of 1984 killed perhaps a million while his government spent on arms and the tenth anniversary of the revolution. He lives in Zimbabwe today.

Siad Barre, Somalia, 1969 to 1991. Twenty-two years. He began with real things: a written Somali alphabet, a literacy campaign, roads. He ended by bombing his own city, Hargeisa, from the air in 1988, killing tens of thousands and emptying it. When he fell in January 1991 he did not leave a weakened state. He left no state at all, and for more than twenty years Somalia had no government that could collect a tax or deliver a letter.

The Heir

Rwanda.

Africa

April to July 1994. About eight hundred thousand people, most of them Tutsi, killed in a hundred days, largely by hand, by neighbours, organised by a state that had one radio station and used it to give instructions. One radio station. Remember that number.

The Heir

The wars.

Africa

Biafra, 1967 to 1970, Nigeria's civil war: one to three million dead, most of them children, of hunger. Liberia, 1989 to 2003, Charles Taylor's war and the ones it bred: a quarter of a million dead and a country where children were made to kill. Sierra Leone beside it. Angola and Mozambique, thirty years of war each, fought partly with other people's weapons for other people's reasons. Sudan, longest of all.

The Heir

And the coups.

Africa

Since 1950, more than two hundred coup attempts on my soil, about half of them successful. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s a coup somewhere in Africa roughly every six months. Nigeria had seven. Ghana five. Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Benin, more. Each one taught every officer in every barracks the same lesson: the state belongs to whoever reaches the radio station first.

The Heir

So that is the number. Billions stolen, millions dead, a coup every six months. And you want me not to blame.

Africa

I want you to count further than the men, because if you stop at the men you will think the cure is better men, and it is not. Ask who handed them the house, and who paid them to keep it.

Who handed it: the first generation, as we saw, and before them the colonial state, which in every country was built for one ruler with one army and no one to answer to. Mobutu did not invent the one-party state in Congo; the Belgians had run it as a private estate of their king, and then as a colony with no African officers, no African graduates, and no African voters. At independence Congo had fewer than twenty university graduates in a population of fourteen million.

Who paid: during the Cold War, the United States, France, Britain, the Soviet Union and others each paid men to stay. Mobutu was received at the White House by five presidents and called a friend. Mengistu got his weapons from Moscow. Siad Barre got his from Moscow first and then from Washington. France kept troops in a dozen of its former colonies and removed or installed leaders when it chose; Bokassa's crown was partly a French gift. The money went in as aid and loans and came back out as deposits in Switzerland, and every bank that took it knew.

The Heir

So the second generation were our thieves, with foreign keys.

Africa

With foreign money, foreign weapons and foreign banks, in a house built by foreigners and finished by our own heroes. Now count the last thing, the one nobody counts. In the 1980s and 1990s, the lost decades, my countries owed so much that they spent more repaying it than on health and schools. Structural adjustment, the price of new loans, cut what little was left. Real income per person in sub-Saharan Africa was lower in 1995 than it had been in 1975. A whole generation, your parents, grew up watching the continent go backwards while the men at the top grew palaces. That is where the belief that nothing here will change was born. Not in the colonial years. In these.

The Heir

Then let me say what I think you are telling me. The second generation did not fail because they were Africans, or because they were evil, though some were. They failed because the house had one door and one key, and the world outside paid whoever held it.

Africa

And because nothing stood beside them. No court that could overrule, no newspaper that could shame, no party that could replace, no company that could compete. When one radio station is the only one, it can order a genocide. When one man is the only one, he can empty a treasury. The One is not a character flaw. It is an architecture. And an architecture can be redrawn.

The Heir

You said there were some good ones in this generation.

Africa

Botswana's Quett Masire, who followed Khama and kept the house honest for eighteen years. Mauritius, which had coalition governments and became the richest country on my soil per person without a single coup. Senegal, which never had one. Cape Verde. Even in the worst years, a handful of countries proved that the architecture could be different. They were small, they were few, and nobody wrote about them, because a country where nothing goes wrong is not news.

The Heir

So the diagnosis is the number one.

Africa

The diagnosis is the number one. In the next round I will show you every form it took, so that you can recognise it the moment it appears in your own country, because it will, wearing a new suit and holding an election.