In most cities, the road from the airport to the area where the best hotels are is usually the best. It’s particularly the case in developing countries with authoritarian regimes that prefer to showcase shiny boulevards and wide avenues as evidence of development while hiding signs of poverty and destitution in decrepit shanties and slums. Not so in Harare, where the main drag from the airport is pot-holed and the street lights don’t work because the government can’t afford the electricity.
Over a decade ago, in a different African capital, over a nightcap, I heard some interesting discussions about Zimbabwe.
Why didn’t they get rid of him the old fashioned way, you know, APCs on the streets, tanks in front of the presidential palace, radio or TV broadcast by some unknown major…..
An old Africa hand explained why Robert Mugabe wasn’t toppled in a coup. No, it wasn’t because of his liberation cred. Kwame Nkrumah or Milton Obote were no less of independence heroes to their respective countries. Both were ingloriously booted out, not just of their presidential palaces, but also the countries they led to existence. At least they lived, unlike say Patrice Lumumba. Clearly being a national liberator figure didn’t make one coup-proof, particularly if one had turned his (can’t think of a mother of the nation top of my head!) country into a basket case, and had faced concerted political pressure from home and abroad. According to my colleague with years of experience in the continent, the key to Mugabe’s survival was in his relative ‘latecomer’ status.
Mugabe came to power much later than was the case for other African founding fathers. And the disastrous denouement of his rule happened during a period when the great powers saw little strategic importance in regime change in an obscure corner of the world. The second factor meant there was no foreign sponsor to any coup. The former meant that any would be coupmaker, and their domestic supporters, knew from the experiences elsewhere in the continent about what coups begat.
Mugabe gave them hyperinflation. Getting rid of him could lead to inter-ethnic war. Easier to do currency reform than deal with refugees fleeing genocide…..
Once upon a time, Robert Mugabe was considered a new kind of African founding father — a peacemaker who reconciled with his enemies, and thus reaping the peace dividend. In a 1990s piece on the virtues of globalisation, Paul Krugman used Zimbabwean flowers as an example of how trade helped the poor.
What went wrong? Is it just simply the case of, to paraphrase Harvey Dent, not dying a hero to see oneself become the villain? Or is there more to it?
Shaun Larcom (Cambridge), Mare Sarr (Cape Town), and Tim Willems (OxCarre) explore the evolution of strong(wo)men into tyrant or democratising reformer.* Warning: this is a relatively maths-heavy paper, and not an easy read for the uninitiated. Which is a pity because the ideas are novel, and have great real world relevance. The authors should try better to express their ideas in plain English!
Their key insight is to link a strong(wo)man’s stock of wrongdoing with flow of repression. There are two kinds of wrongdoings: rent seeking — personal corruption or cronyism or monopoly over patronage network; and repression — of the opposition to stay in power, or revenge for past historical events. A strong(wo)man may not start out with any repression. However, an authoritarian regime is always going to be more prone to egregious rent seeking. Over time, this rent seeking adds up, and there is a threshold of the stock of wrongdoing beyond which an opposition to the regime mobilises.
There is a crucial element to the opposition in the authors’ set up — the opposition would like to bring the regime to justice for its past wrongdoing, and the graver the wrongdoing the stronger / more likely the future punishment. The regime doesn’t know exactly when the opposition will mobilise. But at some critical threshold, it will conclude that giving up power is no longer an option because of the threat of severe punishment for its past sins. From that point on, the regime will commit further wrongdoing by repressing the opposition.
It’s the interaction between the two threshold points of past sins that determine whether a given regime will degenerate into tyranny or reform itself. Suppose the opposition mobilises relatively early, before the regime has reached its point of no return. In that scenario, the regime is likely to limit its future wrongdoings — rent-seeking as well as repression — and in some cases can be persuaded to give up power. This result will hold even if the regime starts out with some repression.
In Bangladeshi history, we can think of the Ershad regime as an example of such a regime — a military dictatorship led by a notoriously corrupt man, it never became truly tyrannical as it faced opposition from very early on.
Conversely, if the opposition fails to mobilise before the regime commits too many wrongs, it becomes trapped in a bad dynamic, where the regime doubles down and each repressive act makes it ever more tyrannical — the country now becomes a prisoner of its past.
Did Bangladesh reach such a state in May 2013, after the Shapla Chattar massacre? Was it earlier, when Grameen Bank was snatched from Muhammad Yunus, or Ziaur Rahman’s house was demolished? Or was it over the mishandling of the BDR mutiny in 2009? We can argue about when the tipping point was reached. But it’s hard to imagine the regime reforming itself.
It’s hotter than July in Dhaka, but no one should be feeling pretty!
*Larcom S, Sarr M, Willems T (2016), Dictators Walking the Mogadishu Line: How Men Become Monsters and Monsters Become Men, World Bank Economic Review.
History offers many examples of dictators who worsened their behavior significantly over time (like Zimbabwe’s Mugabe) as well as dictators who displayed remarkable improvements (like Rawlings of Ghana). We show that such mutations can result from rational behavior when the dictator’s flow use of repression is complementary to his stock of wrongdoings: past wrongdoings then perpetuate further wrongdoings and the dictator can unintentionally get trapped in a repressive steady state where he himself suffers from ex-post regret. This then begs the question why such a dictator would ever choose to do wrong in the first place. We show that this can be explained from the dictator’s uncertainty over his degree of impunity in relation to wrongdoing, which induces him to experiment along this dimension. This produces a setting where any individual rising to power can end up as either a moderate leader, or as a dreaded tyrant. Since derailment is accidental and accompanied by ex-post regret, increasing accountability can be in the interest of both the public and the dictator.
The post refers to the Stevie Wonder’s tribute to Bob Marley, which was released as peace had come to Zimbabwe.
Further reading
James Astill, 2 June 2023
Tasneem Khalil, 13 June 2023
Ali Riaz, 15 June 2023
Zarif Faiaz, July 2023