Алистер Смит - The Dictator's Handbook - Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

Caesar made the mistake of trying to help the people by using a portion of the coalition’s share of rewards. It is fine for leaders to enrich the people’s lives, but it has to come out of the leader’s pocket, not the coalition’s. The stories of Caesar and Castellano remind us that too many good deeds or too much greed are equally punished if the coalition loses out as a result.

As we have seen, there is a fine balance between giving enough private goods to keep the coalition loyal and giving too much or too little. When money is spent elsewhere that “rightfully” belongs to the coalition, there is a serious risk of a coup d’état. When more money is spent on the coalition than is their due, then the incumbent wastes funds that would otherwise have been his.

Discretionary Money

What is a leader to do with any money that need not go to the coalition to buy loyalty? There are two answers to this question: sock it away in a secret account or lavish it on the people. Those who are most successful at stealing for their own benefit open the door to joining our Haul of Fame. Those who are more civic-minded spend discretionary money to help the people, but only some of them are good at it. The successful join our Hall of Fame and the unsuccessful, those with bad ideas about civic improvement, become members of our Hall of Shame.

According to Hank Gonzalez, a politician in Mexico before democratization, “A politician who stays poor is poor at politics.”15 On this basis, Zaire’s Mobutu was a political genius. He allegedly stole billions. His biographer, Michela Wrong, observes that, “No other African autocrat had proved such a wily survivor. No other president had been presented with a country of such potential, yet achieved so little. No other leader had plundered his economy so effectively or lived the high life to such excess.”16 Indeed, the word kleptocrat, meaning rule by theft, was coined to describe Mobutu’s style of governance. But though Mobutu made kleptocracy famous, he didn’t invent it.

King Solomon is reported to have had 700 wives. One can only wonder for how many of them the choice was theirs or his alone. And then who can forget the economic looting of the Caliphate. A serious estimate of the Caliphate’s income for the years 918–919 is 15.5 million dinars, 10.5 million of which was spent on the Caliphs household.17 To put that in perspective, if President Barack Obama had that proportion of the US economy available for his household’s discretionary use, he and Michelle would personally control a cool $5 trillion, give or take a few hundred billion. There, indeed, is the reason people took such great risks to become the Caliph.

Small-coalition leaders have tons of money to use as they see fit. Even though they compensate their coalition of essential backers well, with so few who need to be bribed, plenty is left over. Some incumbents may choose to use their discretionary pile of money for civic-minded purposes—we’ll talk about them when we discuss hall of shame and hall of fame leaders—but an awful lot just want to sock the money away for a rainy day. It is to accommodate just such leaders that secret bank accounts exist.

The prevalence of master thieves among world leaders is striking. Some succeed on a relatively small scale like Alberto Fujimori, Peru’s president from 1990–2000 (including a so-called self-coup in 1992, in which he suspended his own Congress and constitution). He probably didn’t take more than a few hundred million. And with Peru’s return to democracy, Fujimori, who went into self-imposed exile, found himself extradited, returned to Peru, put on trial, and convicted of murder, human rights violations, bribery, and a host of other crimes for which he was imprisoned. He just did what any small-coalition leader does, but he had the misfortune of being removed following popular discontent with his corruption and being replaced by a large-coalition regime.

Others do considerably better considering the meager means of their society. Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic, for instance, is believed to have accumulated $1 billion in a country where per capita income fell by 50 percent during his rule. He followed key political principles: his coalition was small; he taxed heavily, allowing him to make a fortune on the backs of the poor Serbs; and he made sure to keep the people downtrodden. Reliable reports indicate that he precipitated food shortages and massive unemployment for Serbs who opposed him, leaving millions in desperate circumstances while enriching 10,000 influential supporters.

Moving up the ladder of success when it comes to treating the national treasury as one’s personal account, we come to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. He built billion-dollar palaces for himself while his country’s infants died of easily treated diseases. Other notable national thieves distinguished by their relative take given the impoverishment of their societies are such figures as Uganda’s Idi Amin, Haiti’s Papa Doc Duvalier, and then his son, Baby Doc Duvalier, and the list goes on. They all typify the rule of successful autocrats—they know how to build, manage, and finance tight coalitions while enriching themselves. But they are all—except for Mobutu—little leaguers when compared to the champion haul of famers.

When it comes to the crème de la crème of kleptocrats, some of the greats include Indonesia’s Suharto (president from 1967 to 1997), Zaire’s Mobutu (president from 1965 to 1997), the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos (ruled from 1965 to 1986), and perhaps the current incumbent front-runner, Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir. He came to power in 1993 and still is in office as of this writing, despite indictment by the International Criminal Court for human rights violations, war crimes, and genocide.

Mr. Suharto, referred to by The Economist magazine as the king of kleptocrats, is alleged by Transparency International to have stolen up to $35 billion from his country.18 His late wife, Madame Tien, was often known as “Madame Tien percent.” Of course we cannot know what the true amount captured by his family was but we do know that he depended on a small coalition, he had lots of discretionary power, he survived in office for more than thirty years, and he lived out his life as a free man in Indonesia (he died in 2008). Apparently he was considered too ill to prosecute.

Like Suharto, Zaire’s Mobutu lasted in power for more than thirty years, ousted only once he was known to be suffering from terminal cancer. Mobutu stole billions and lived the high life, whereas Suharto lived more modestly considering his alleged means. Mobutu owned villas in the Swiss Alps, Portugal, the French Riviera, and numerous residences in Brussels. In addition he had a presidential palace in just about every major town in Zaire, including a palace in his home town of Gbadolite. With a population of about 114,000, one would not have thought the town needed an airport that could handle the supersonic Concorde, but then one of the 114,000 sometimes residents was Mobutu. He apparently rented the Concorde from Air France for his personal use and, needing a proper airfield for it to land and take off, he built one for himself.

Ferdinand Marcos, like Suharto, seemingly ran a successful economy. The growth rate during many of Marcos’s years was quite good, but then the Philippine population was growing faster than the economy. Whereas Suharto had been successful at controlling population growth, Marcos did not do so well. But he certainly did well through his so-called crony-capitalism system in enriching his coalition and himself. Transparency International estimated that Marcos looted billions from his country. His wife, Imelda, notorious for her enormous shoe collection, was brought up on charges related to the family’s theft of Philippine wealth and the government succeeded in recovering $684 million, a relatively small portion of the total allegedly taken by Marcos and his family. Despite their alleged thievery, the Marcos family, remarkably, is making a political comeback in the Philippines. It seems money really makes the world—of politics—go round!