
The Return of Africa’s Strongmen - tokenadult
http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-return-of-africas-strongmen-1417798993
======
wtbob
Given that democracy is at its heart mob rule, in countries without a liberal
democratic tradition the losers of elections tend to also lose their lives and
privileges; it'd be insane to ever step down as president in many of these
Third World states.

Rather than embracing democracy fetishism, what if we embraced liberty
instead? Let the strongmen declare themselves Kings or Presidents-for-Life or
whatever, but encourage them to actually foster liberty for their subjects,
rather than trying to run an entire nation from a single desk.

Just a thought.

~~~
Apocryphon
Isn't this what we practiced in the '80s, with Pinochet's Chile?

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
And from wiki: "Various reports and investigations claim that between 1,200
and 3,200 people were killed, up to 80,000 people were interned and as many as
30,000 were tortured during the time Pinochet was in government."

September 11th, 1973. Never forget.

~~~
hga
I might be impressed by such sentiments if the Left had a fraction of the same
attitude towards the _5 orders of magnitude greater_ number of people killed
by the type of people Pinochet and company killed. Yep, it generally agreed
that a bare minimum of 100 million were killed by Communists in the 20th
Century; my rough guess, with a non-standard accounting for pre-1949 China, is
more like 250 million.

"Some people just need killing", and I put Communist revolutionaries very high
on that list.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
The vast majority of those deaths are from famine (and if you're seriously
going to add an extra 150 million from pre-1949, how many are you going to put
on the ledger of the Nationalist government or the Japanese?)

Here's a couple posts (from an unexpected source) that go into depth on these
kind of numbers, and the things that come up when you take seriously the
assumptions that went into generating them and seeing where that leads.

[http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/mustachianism-around-the-
we...](http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/mustachianism-around-the-web/'who-
gets-rewarded-by-our-economy'-salon-com/msg420147/#msg420147)

[http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/mustachianism-around-the-
we...](http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/mustachianism-around-the-web/'who-
gets-rewarded-by-our-economy'-salon-com/msg422771/#msg422771)

~~~
hga
I was perhaps was not clear about pre-1949 China: "only" 60-70 million were
estimated to have been killed in that period as of the early '80s, and that
includes those killed by the Japanese. I attribute more deaths to the
Communists than most.

As for famine, if you're trying to suggest events caused by "agrarian
reformers" like the Holodomor and Great Leap Forward just happened to have
starved a lot of people due to "bad luck" or the like, I don't see us having
any basis for discussion.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
I'm going to quote from that link:

""" On the subject of famine it is also important to have some perspective
regarding the incredible pressures the communist countries were subjected to,
and the desperate programs of industrialization they were forced to adopt.
From the outset, the west was intensely hostile to communism and placed it
under perpetual threat of military defeat. This was true from the early
invasion of the newly declared USSR by WWI allied governments, to the runup to
and ultimate defeat of Nazism by the Soviet Union, to the Cold war, to the
western backing of the Nationalist government in China, to Eisenhower's
threats of catastrophic nuclear retaliation against China during the 1950s. In
every case, it was absolutely imperative that the communist governments
industrialize as rapidly and as thoroughly as possible, costs be damned. In
the USSR, the wisdom of the industrialization policy was proven by the defeat
of fascism in 1945; but throwing every possible hour of labor into
industrialization meant that other aspects of the economy were neglected and
catastrophic mistakes like the famine in Ukraine could occur. The exact same
motivation and consequence were what caused the Great Leap Forward and the
famine associated with it."""

Note that this is very different than the famines we know about that were
actually engineered by a government, such as, to pick just one example, the
Bengal Famine of 1943
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943))

~~~
mercurial
I was under the impression that once the Russian Civil War was over, Western
governments lost interest in the kind of regime in place in the USSR. On the
other hand, Stalin had no qualms helping the Nazis prior to WWII. As for the
Ukrainian famine, its causes are far from being as clear-cut as you present
them, IMHO.

People like Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot had evidently very little regard for human
life. This doesn't mean that all communist regimes should be put in the same
bag (eg, Castro, as far as I know, didn't genocide anybody, and I don't think
his suppression of political opponents was particularly worse than what
Batista's secret police did).

Trying to excuse Pinochet's crimes "because Stalin" or "because Mao" is as
bizarre as trying to pretend that Stalin or Mao were not mass murderers. Where
I can sympathize is that Western-engineered massacres are rarely mentioned in
comparison.

------
lionsdan
From the article: "But Nigeria’s army...still wields considerable power. A
fifth of Nigeria’s nearly $30 billion budget goes to the armed forces."

That's almost exactly the same percentage as in the USA[1].

[1]
[http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=1258](http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=1258)

~~~
rustyconover
A more insightful measure would be against GDP rather than government budget
total.

~~~
lionsdan
USA = 3.8%, Nigeria = 0.5%

[http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS/countr...](http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS/countries)

~~~
adventured
Interestingly it had been climbing for years, and reached 0.8% in 2011, but
has been falling since then:

[http://www.janes.com/article/32167/nigerian-defence-
spending...](http://www.janes.com/article/32167/nigerian-defence-spending-to-
fall-for-the-first-time-in-a-decade)

Given Nigeria's security challenges, I would have expected greater military
spending. At 0.5% it's among the lowest on earth.

------
tokenadult
I was struck by what the article reported about recent trends in
democratization after years of economic progress in most of the many countries
in Africa. "For now, the advance of democracy in Africa appears to have
stalled. In 1990, just three of Africa’s 48 countries were electoral
democracies, according to Freedom House, a Washington-based pro-democracy
advocacy group. By 1994, that number had leapt to 18. Two decades later, only
19 qualify." What I like about the article is that it distinguishes the
situations in differing countries on a continent of considerable diversity.
Going to a recent Freedom House blog post[1] showed a map of which countries
that organization identifies as "free" (green on the map), "partly free"
(yellow), and "not free" (purple) by that organization's rating scale.
Fortunately, some of the most populous countries in Africa are free (e.g.,
South Africa) or partly free (e.g., Nigeria and Kenya). The commentary in the
post about ten different countries was also informative about key issues.

Yes, the main issue is freedom. The countries that additionally have democracy
usually bring along with effective democracy such individual liberty features
as an independent judiciary, a free press, and freedom of speech for the
populace. That's important for people's daily lives. I lived in Taiwan both
before and after that country's democratization, and life became much better
with democracy. I'd like to see the same happen in many more countries around
the world.

[1] [https://freedomhouse.org/blog/10-positive-developments-
afric...](https://freedomhouse.org/blog/10-positive-developments-
africa-2013#.VIO6bDHF-So)

[https://freedomhouse.org/regions/sub-saharan-
africa#.VIO9pDH...](https://freedomhouse.org/regions/sub-saharan-
africa#.VIO9pDHF-So)

------
knappador
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/mfonobongnsehe/2014/12/01/nigeri...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/mfonobongnsehe/2014/12/01/nigerian-
billionaire-tony-elumelu-commits-100-million-to-create-10000-african-
entrepreneurs-in-10-years/)

This is the strong man in Nigeria. To adapt a joke to context, the police went
into the compound with tear gas and came out with...jobs, and that was the end
of chaos in Nigeria.

------
kumarski
I think the key to Africa is the same as the key to India. The conflagration
of languages other than English or other than the majority.

Africa still has a diverse language stack that stifles its progress. 2000
languages.

India had ~750 languages 50 years ago. Today it has ~250 languages.

~~~
vikiomega9
Is such a trade-off a good thing?

~~~
saurya
Especially if it doesn't even solve the problem.

