The Return of Africa’s Strongmen | Hacker News Reader

The Return of Africa’s Strongmen

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40 pointstokenadult24 comments

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.

I would think what you call liberal democratic tradition is because most democracies are established as functioning republics.

That's the truth at the heart of statist (as opposed to anarchist) libertarianism. A despot is a despot, whether they're exercising power purely for self-interest, or according to "enlightened" principles.

Yes, by definition "despot" is simply a measure of one persons power. But this word also has significant negative connotation, which I find unfair. First off, simply because it's implying that "somewhere out there is a problem and here we are smart guys sitting in our comfy chairs in a country with electricity and deciding if it's right or not", and if "out there" isn't actually your country where you are living yourself it's none of your business. Second, implying that "situation in the country doesn't matter" as you do right now is simply absurd. We must remember, that all that stuff isn't something that simply "happens", but actual people making real decisions, drinking their morning coffee while thinking what they ought to do next in a country where everything might just change radically every minute. Believing that it is their moral obligation both to "care about your country" and "not to become a dictator" is simply contradictory, because it's quite likely that situation makes him to believe it's his only choice to hold power in his hands steadily and stepping aside after 4 or 8 or whatever years would be outright contradictory to "caring about your country". Even if we actually would like to step aside, because it's easier. He might be wrong, but if he truly does this believing that this is his only moral choice, that he does it for his people's sake — even if he is wrong in my opinion I would know better than disrespect his sacrifice by saying something like "A despot is a despot, whether they're exercising power purely for self-interest or not". But if he is right and actually rules justly, making lives better, then I have no problem with it whatsoever. Opposing it would be nothing more than saying simply that "democracy is the best form of government", and now this is something I have problem with, because even if it could be true in the case of that old, pure "Athenian democracy" (and could be not), implying that this fake "democracy thing" that is called "democracy" in USA and UK today is the same thing — is simply wrong, even harmful, and "if it actually is the best form of government" is actually a very serious question by itself.

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

Yes, and it hasn't worked anywhere that it has been tried in modern times.

A Republic is the ideal formulation, balancing representative systems with checks & balances, an independent judiciary capable of striking down attempts at authoritarianism and protecting individual rights via a sound constitution, and a moderate executive office.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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)

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.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Once they are entrenched, and their allies and family members have started to siphon public money, why would they ever give up?

Especially since these are not countries with strong institutions and a lot of regards for human rights. Nothing keeps the next strongman from disappearing them. It's closer to medieval politics than western democracy.

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

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

USA = 3.8%, Nigeria = 0.5%

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS/countr...

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...

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

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/regions/sub-saharan-africa#.VIO9pDH...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/mfonobongnsehe/2014/12/01/nigeri...

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.

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.

Is such a trade-off a good thing?

Especially if it doesn't even solve the problem.

Except that India is a country and Africa is a continent. And language and ethnic politics aren't the largest issues here: its actual policy and governance. I don't see how language homogenization solved major problems in India other than the east (Nagaland, Assam) or how its democratic to even do this the way the French and English did in their nations to minority languages.

Any source for this? Intuitively I can see why working with 2k languages is harder than working with 1. But if you read e.g. a report like this: http://www.doingbusiness.org/reports

which is very relevant to SMEs, the driving force for about 98%+ of economic activity, jobs, tax revenues etc and the economic progress to increase the standard of life, you don't really see language as a variable. (and it's a pretty comprehensive report).

I mean, how bad is it, really? Most countries have multiple languages, but also a single official language. I've been to Africa many times and due to its colonial history French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, they get you pretty far in most places. In my own city we have over 175 nationalities, but communication is never a problem. It would be a mistake for an outsider who never visited to look at that number and then claim it's the origin of any particular problem in the city without any extra information. So I'm genuinely interested if you know of any studies that show the language diversity is a stifling issue.

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