Today I'm proud to bring you step-by-step instructions on how to make yourself an effective national leader in this continent, particularly for those with an eye on despotism. Obviously I don't have personal experience in the field, but a few months of casual observation is all that is needed to make anyone an expert in the topic.
1. Firstly and most importantly, steal the equivalent of your country’s GDP from government funds and keep the lot in a personal bank account in Switzerland. There’s millions and millions of dollars stashed there – more money than one individual could ever spend in a lifetime of squandering – enough, even, to catapult the infrastructure of your country forward 20 years in one fell swoop – but that doesn’t matter. It’s important to have it there to make you feel like you’ve earned a personal fortune, even though you filched every penny.
2. Own as much of the press as you possibly can, and any other media channels you can get an influence in. Make sure that any media that you don’t own is intimidated and threatened unrelentingly so that no-one can say anything really bad about you, or worse, the truth.
3. Regularly reshuffle your cabinet. If any members have fallen out of public favour due to corruption allegations, make a big show of sacking them but then make them ‘senior presidential advisors’ to keep them on the gravy train so they don’t stab you in the back. It doesn’t matter if you have a hundred senior presidential advisors, as a president can’t have too much advice. Reward useless sycophants with big cabinet jobs to keep them useless and sycophantic, so you can retain your autocracy.
4. Use any means necessary to mobilise political support, including creating endless new districts so you can make lots of new jobs for your friends in the new administrations. It really doesn’t matter if some of the new districts are based around towns that are little more than a group of shacks, or even just a road junction – the more people you can get on the gravy train, the better, as long as they don’t actually have any real power.
5. Give political rivals enough leash to create the impression of a multiparty democracy, but no so much that they could actually have some power. Let the big guys do and say what they want, but make sure their followers disappear mysteriously.
6. Distract any potential pockets of internal resistance to your regime by allowing them to fight amongst themselves for interminable years. Never mind the misery that will ensue amongst ordinary people – it stops these dissenters giving you any real challenge. This is where tribal differences come in handy. You should exploit these as much as possible to create the most enduring internal conflict you can. Make sure there is a ready supply of weapons to the dissenters or the conflict will dry up too soon.
7. When campaigning for upcoming elections, import cheap sugar from Central America and give half a kilogram each to illiterate mothers in rural areas. Exploit the fact that they value half a kilogram of free sugar once every five years over ongoing and lasting improvements in the education of their children, the health of their family, or the road leading to their village. In fact, try not to improve education too much in case they suddenly realise that a government is supposed to do more than twice-a-decade sugar distribution.
8. When it comes to elections, rig them to make sure you win by threatening or bribing people in the electoral commission. If you can get your own people in the electoral commission, all the better. Make sure anywhere that has international observers, things run like clockwork, but everywhere else make sure the real votes are burnt. As soon as you are declared the winner, your rival will instantly proclaim the elections as rigged, and even though they were, it is important for you to denounce him as a traitor to democracy and an enemy of the country.
9. Remember that the world is full of leaders for life. Generally their countries are in a total mess, but don’t be put off by this. History will show that the leaders of Zimbabwe, Libya, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and all the others, are the kings of their day. As the years go on, gradually remove all obstacles to your continuing in office until the day you die, and then surround yourself with the world’s best unscrupulous doctors to make sure that that day is delayed for as long as possible.
10. Relax! You may have had to do some terrible things to get to where you are today, and you may be causing untold harm to your people, but you’re president for life, and what can provide a better indemnity than that? There’s still the thorny issue of what’ll happen at the pearly gates, but that’s all the more reason to get them to keep you alive until the last possible moment.
Friendometer
I seem to be receiving more than my fair share of complaints about this blog, which I would gladly react to if it weren’t for the inconsistency of them. For example, I have Mr Ibbs grumbling about “monosyllabic Nigelisms”. I don’t know what these are, but they seem to imply a criticism which is the exact opposite of Suzanna’s, who is always carping about my perceived verbosity, as if I write with a thesaurus open by my side. What nonsense! Rubbish! Baloney! Poppycock! Twaddle! Claptrap! Drivel!
And then you get Ben complaining about my blog being “full of frustratingly ambiguous teasers” while my own mother wastes no time in voicing her opinion that my last offering contained “too much detail”. What is an amateur (and mildly self-aggrandising) travel journalist to do? You people just can’t be pleased!
However, I must admit I'm thoroughly enjoying slipping references to a girlfriend at plausible junctures in my blog, as for all you lot know she could be a figment of my imagination, or even a ruse to provoke responses from heretofore silent acquaintances. It certainly gets them crawling out of the woodwork, as many an unsolicited email has testified. It still doesn’t seem to have stimulated any activity in the comments section, though.
Office Hours
Just stop for a moment and imagine living with your boss for a month. If you are flirting with your boss in an effort to gain promotion by illegitimate means then you may be thinking the set-up would suit your purposes rather well. I, however, am not attempting to follow such a cynical and depraved course of action to reach the top, mainly because my boss is neither attractive nor female, but also because the top is occupied by him already and there’s no room for me. Living with him therefore means that I get my head pecked not only from 9 to 5, but also from 5 to 10, lengthening my office hours by a factor of 50% (and giving me a very sore head).
Thursday 19 February 2009
Saturday 7 February 2009
A Gentle Brush Against Fame's Elbow
On Thursday, I had the honour and privilege of meeting the great Tracey Emin: esteemed artist, general London socialite, and patron of one particular school library in Uganda. I was rather excited about the prospect as I’d cited her work many a time during my A-level art studies. I wondered what it would be like to meet such an icon of art history – Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, Van Gogh’s Waterlilies, Emin’s Unmade Bed. She’d always been top of my list of historical figures to have dinner with.
Sadly, this being a web publication open for the whole world to see, I feel that it’s prudent to exercise a degree of self-preservational censorship. This sadly prevents me going on with the story, and I’m sure you can work out why.
The sorry truth is that all my juciest stories from Uganda are the ones that you never get to read about because the associated risk is simply too great. Once time has dampened the sensitivity I promise to publish ‘Nigel in Uganda Uncut – The Bits They Didn’t Want You To Read’.
Office Hours
There is a particular brand of coffee available in Uganda – Tanzanian, as it happens – that is so tasty I’m convinced it’s not really instant, even though no filters, cafetieres, funny Italian pots or Expensive Electronic Equipment are needed to make it. It’s quite hard to track down, so when I found a tin of it in a supermarket the other day I became unduly excited. Having achieved an almost total abstention from caffeinated beverages for the past two years, this stuff has regressed me to a stage where I frequently indulge in two mugs of the stuff at breakfast every morning. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of this extravagance the other morning when I was due to make a long, long journey on public transport to our most remote and rural school.
Nature came knocking only minutes into the journey. I held on tenaciously but as the caffeine got down to its diuretic work, the discomfort only intensified. It was when the minibus turned off the highway onto the unsurfaced country road that things became unbearable. Every bump was a test of my resolve. In the end, much to the vexation of my fellow passengers, I had to ask the driver to stop. I’d have done so sooner if it wasn’t for the fact that I was seated right at the back of the bus, so getting out involved moving several mothers, children, chickens, suitcases, sacks of flour, etc. out of the way. (I’d already considered climbing out the window but it proved unfeasible).
I ran to a nearby bush but when it came to the moment of release, the stress induced by the barely concealed disapproval of my co-passengers reduced what should have been a whitewater deluge to a lame dribble. I managed to squeeze enough out to reduce the intolerable agony to a dull ache, but within ten minutes the intolerable agony was back. Just where was all this liquid coming from?!
It felt like I’d never reach my destination but when I eventually did, I enjoyed the catharsis of a lifetime.
Close Encounters of he African Kind
Anyone who has stayed at my humble abode here in Uganda knows only too well the vexing state of the ‘shower’. This is a great misnomer: the word suggests a capacity for merciless saturation, whereas this particular ablutional device provides more of an apologetic dampening. It would be better described as a ‘trickle’. Upon my parents’ visit only a month ago, me and ‘DIY Dad’ discussed how to remedy this sorry situation, which tended to double the length of my morning hose down and rob me of time in bed.
For some reason, late last Sunday afternoon I decided to get to work on the pipes. What led me to such a radical course of action? Perhaps it had been my Dad’s mistaken assumption that I knew about plumbing. Perhaps it was my good friend Miss Billy Crombie, at whose Manchester home I spent many an hour busily wielding hammers and saws while she delivered endless cuppas, and who massaged the handyman segment of my ego to such proportions that I felt like a DIY superhero. Or was it the company of my girlfriend, to whom I was attempting to demonstrate some sort of manly ability to get my hands dirty and fix stuff? Or maybe it was the imminent presence of my boss from the UK, who would also be staying in the house, and who I wanted to dazzle with how much things had improved since his last visit.
Whatever it was that sent me into such a frenzy of activity, things slowly went very, very wrong. My first mistake came quickly – I sealed off the tank outlet with an upside-down mug and then disconnected the pipe, but the mug proved an utterly inadequate seal and for the duration of the ensuing saga I was constantly aware of the disconcerting fact that at any moment, about 500 litres of water could come hurtling inexorably down onto my head. I realised I needed to work quickly, so proceeded by enacting my Dad’s great idea to connect the taps to the mains instead of the tank. Despite snapping all the exisiting pipes in the process, I was successful, but the result was that the toilet cisterns flooded and an unstemmable tide came from the overflow pipe that went up through the roof. So I had to turn off the mains tap altogether. By that time it was dark and late and I was left significantly worse off: no water whatsoever coming from the shower and a considerably grumpier girlfriend.
I wasn’t at this stage about to pay a professional to put the mess right – I’d spent too much time and money buggering it up to do that – and besides, my status as ‘Mr DIY’ was at stake. So the next day, I browsed through the various pipes and connectors in a local hardware shop, chose a few that looked feasible, and reconnected the pipes, sealing them off with bits of plastic bag. I turned the mains tap back on and needless to say they all leaked. So I turned the mains tap back off. By this time there was no water left in the tank, either, as it had all leaked past the mug. I had managed to impose a full-blown drought upon the household.
As if to add insult to injury, when I finally succeeded at getting the whole thing back to how it was when I started, the mains had been shut off altogether by the water company, so we *still* had no water. By this time my boss had arrived. I hope he doesn’t read this as then he’ll realise that his enforced inability to wash on arrival, and for two days hence, was entirely my fault.
Sadly, this being a web publication open for the whole world to see, I feel that it’s prudent to exercise a degree of self-preservational censorship. This sadly prevents me going on with the story, and I’m sure you can work out why.
The sorry truth is that all my juciest stories from Uganda are the ones that you never get to read about because the associated risk is simply too great. Once time has dampened the sensitivity I promise to publish ‘Nigel in Uganda Uncut – The Bits They Didn’t Want You To Read’.
Office Hours
There is a particular brand of coffee available in Uganda – Tanzanian, as it happens – that is so tasty I’m convinced it’s not really instant, even though no filters, cafetieres, funny Italian pots or Expensive Electronic Equipment are needed to make it. It’s quite hard to track down, so when I found a tin of it in a supermarket the other day I became unduly excited. Having achieved an almost total abstention from caffeinated beverages for the past two years, this stuff has regressed me to a stage where I frequently indulge in two mugs of the stuff at breakfast every morning. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of this extravagance the other morning when I was due to make a long, long journey on public transport to our most remote and rural school.
Nature came knocking only minutes into the journey. I held on tenaciously but as the caffeine got down to its diuretic work, the discomfort only intensified. It was when the minibus turned off the highway onto the unsurfaced country road that things became unbearable. Every bump was a test of my resolve. In the end, much to the vexation of my fellow passengers, I had to ask the driver to stop. I’d have done so sooner if it wasn’t for the fact that I was seated right at the back of the bus, so getting out involved moving several mothers, children, chickens, suitcases, sacks of flour, etc. out of the way. (I’d already considered climbing out the window but it proved unfeasible).
I ran to a nearby bush but when it came to the moment of release, the stress induced by the barely concealed disapproval of my co-passengers reduced what should have been a whitewater deluge to a lame dribble. I managed to squeeze enough out to reduce the intolerable agony to a dull ache, but within ten minutes the intolerable agony was back. Just where was all this liquid coming from?!
It felt like I’d never reach my destination but when I eventually did, I enjoyed the catharsis of a lifetime.
Close Encounters of he African Kind
Anyone who has stayed at my humble abode here in Uganda knows only too well the vexing state of the ‘shower’. This is a great misnomer: the word suggests a capacity for merciless saturation, whereas this particular ablutional device provides more of an apologetic dampening. It would be better described as a ‘trickle’. Upon my parents’ visit only a month ago, me and ‘DIY Dad’ discussed how to remedy this sorry situation, which tended to double the length of my morning hose down and rob me of time in bed.
For some reason, late last Sunday afternoon I decided to get to work on the pipes. What led me to such a radical course of action? Perhaps it had been my Dad’s mistaken assumption that I knew about plumbing. Perhaps it was my good friend Miss Billy Crombie, at whose Manchester home I spent many an hour busily wielding hammers and saws while she delivered endless cuppas, and who massaged the handyman segment of my ego to such proportions that I felt like a DIY superhero. Or was it the company of my girlfriend, to whom I was attempting to demonstrate some sort of manly ability to get my hands dirty and fix stuff? Or maybe it was the imminent presence of my boss from the UK, who would also be staying in the house, and who I wanted to dazzle with how much things had improved since his last visit.
Whatever it was that sent me into such a frenzy of activity, things slowly went very, very wrong. My first mistake came quickly – I sealed off the tank outlet with an upside-down mug and then disconnected the pipe, but the mug proved an utterly inadequate seal and for the duration of the ensuing saga I was constantly aware of the disconcerting fact that at any moment, about 500 litres of water could come hurtling inexorably down onto my head. I realised I needed to work quickly, so proceeded by enacting my Dad’s great idea to connect the taps to the mains instead of the tank. Despite snapping all the exisiting pipes in the process, I was successful, but the result was that the toilet cisterns flooded and an unstemmable tide came from the overflow pipe that went up through the roof. So I had to turn off the mains tap altogether. By that time it was dark and late and I was left significantly worse off: no water whatsoever coming from the shower and a considerably grumpier girlfriend.
I wasn’t at this stage about to pay a professional to put the mess right – I’d spent too much time and money buggering it up to do that – and besides, my status as ‘Mr DIY’ was at stake. So the next day, I browsed through the various pipes and connectors in a local hardware shop, chose a few that looked feasible, and reconnected the pipes, sealing them off with bits of plastic bag. I turned the mains tap back on and needless to say they all leaked. So I turned the mains tap back off. By this time there was no water left in the tank, either, as it had all leaked past the mug. I had managed to impose a full-blown drought upon the household.
As if to add insult to injury, when I finally succeeded at getting the whole thing back to how it was when I started, the mains had been shut off altogether by the water company, so we *still* had no water. By this time my boss had arrived. I hope he doesn’t read this as then he’ll realise that his enforced inability to wash on arrival, and for two days hence, was entirely my fault.
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