Aidan Hartley
National Post
July 26, 2005
“Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz,” prayed Janis Joplin, and the Lord obliged. With or without divine intervention, the late Pope had one. So does the queen. Mao Zedong had 23 Mercs, Kim Jong-il owns dozens, Hitler, Franco, Hirohito, Tito, the Shah, Ceausescu, Pinochet, Somoza, Saddam – they all swore by Mercedes. Saddam Hussein liked them so much he probably had shares in the company.

These days, the man who has been doing more than the Lord himself to buy a Mercedes-Benz for the leading creeps of the world is Bob Geldof, the spur to our global conscience. Africa’s leaders cannot wait for the G8 leaders – hectored by Bob and Live 8 into bracelet-wearing submission – to double aid and forgive the continent’s debts. They know that such acts of generosity will finance their future purchases of very swish, customized Mercedes-Benz cars, while more than 300-million poor Africans stay without shoes and Western taxpayers get by with Hondas. This is the way it goes with the WaBenzi, a Swahili term for the Big Men of Africa.

The WaBenzi are a transcontinental tribe who have been committing grand theft auto on the dusty, potholed roads of Africa ever since they hijacked freedom in the 1960s. After joyriding their way through six Marshall Plans’ worth of aid, Africa is poorer today than 25 years ago.

Let us take Zimbabwe, where millions of people are starving, 3,000 die weekly of AIDS and life expectancy has fallen to 35 years.

In Robert Mugabe’s recent address to Zanu-PF’s central committee, he called, for “clean leadership,” condemning “arrogant flamboyance and wastefulness: a dozen Mercedes-Benz cars to one life, hideously huge residences, strange appetites that can only be appeased by foreign dishes; runaway taste for foreign lifestyles, including sporting fixtures, add to it high immorality and lust.”

He is clearly talking about the WaBenzi, and their preferred version of the marque, the S600L, a long-wheel-base limo with a monstrous 7.3-litre V12 twin-turbo-charged engine. It’s as powerful as a Ferrari and 21-feet-long. Basic price $204,000 but extras could be $545,000 more.

Mugabe’s own S600L was custom-built in Germany and armoured to a “B7 Dragunov standard” so that it can withstand AK-47 bullets, grenades and landmines. It is fitted with CD player, movies, Internet and anti-bugging devices. At five tonnes it does about two kilometres per litre of fuel. It has to be followed by a tanker of gas in a country running on empty. Mugabe has bought a car pool of dozens of lesser Mercedes S320s and E240s for his wife, vice-presidents and ministers.

Just as the “Wind of Change” swept Africa in the 1960s, Mercedes produced the stretch 600 Pullman, a six-door behemoth with a 6.3-litre V8 engine. For Africa’s new top dogs, it was love at first sight. The WaBenzi were born. Idi Amin snapped up three, Jean-Bédel Bokassa more when he crowned himself emperor of the Central African Republic. Zaire’s Sese Seko Mobutu bought so many that he kept six for his summer house on Lake Kivu alone. Liberia’s Sergeant Samuel Doe splurged on 60.

I asked the veteran trans-Africa rally driver Anthony Cazalet what it was like to drive the old Pullman. “You don’t drive it, your chauffeur does,” he said. “Look, it’s a Queen Mum of a car: gentle, smooth, quiet; growls when necessary. Huge amounts of legroom and enormous seats for very big bottoms.” Cazalet once took a friend’s Pullman for a spin in Nairobi. “I floored the throttle and the old girl pulled up her skirt and let rip. Everybody in the car was screaming.”

Of course, not all Africans who own Mercedes are WaBenzi. Thanks in large part to anti-state corruption drives by the World Bank, a middle class of hard-working, talented entrepreneurs has emerged in Africa in the last two decades. They want to buy quality cars for the same reason successful Westerners do. As one Kampala businessman says, “I am a serious person and I want that to be portrayed even through the car I drive.”

But the WaBenzi prefer the traditional way of getting someone else to buy your German-built machine.

Take, for example, Malawi’s “Benz Aid” scandal. In 2000, Bakili Muluzi was hailed as a paragon of African “good governance” after President Hastings Kamuzu Banda died. The Economist rated Blantyre as the best city to live in in the world. Malawi’s government celebrated by buying 39 top-of-the-range S-class Mercedes for $3.7 million.

Last year, King Mswati III of Swaziland passed over Mercedes and went for a $546,000 Maybach 62 for himself plus a fleet of BMW’s for each of his 10 wives and three virginal fiancées selected annually at the football-stadium “dance of the impalas.” In May, he changed his mind about Mercedes and roared up to his rubber-stamp parliament in a new S600L limo. The total bill for his car purchases will be about $1.6 million. Yet 70% of Swazis languish in absolute poverty and four out of 10 have HIV/AIDS, the highest rate in the world.

As for South Africa, Nelson Mandela accepted the gift of a Mercedes from the manufacturer. In 2001 the ANC chief whip Tony Yengeni was charged and later jailed for accepting a Mercedes ML320 at a 48% discount in return for lobbying on behalf of Daimlerchrysler companies in the European Aeronautic Defence and Space consortium (EADS). At the same time EADS was bidding for huge defence contracts, and Mercedes-Benz unilaterally admitted making dozens of cars available at discount prices. Some 32 officials, including the national defence chief General Siphiwe Nyanda, benefited. According to local press reports, President Thabo Mbeki had been given an S600L armoured limousine for a “test drive.” He kept it for a full six months, handing it back just as the Yengeni scandal broke.

The following year, Muammar Gaddafi gave Mbeki an S600L as a present. ANC officials claimed the President was “truly embarrassed,” but did he refuse the gift?

The original home of the WaBenzi is Kenya. After decades of dictatorship, voters in 2002 swept Mwai Kibaki to power at the head of his NARC rainbow coalition on an anti-corruption ticket. The very first law Kibaki’s parliament passed rewarded politicians with a 172% salary increase. MPs’ take-home pay is now about $142,000 per annum and the Kenyan MPs’ fat package of allowances includes a $51,500 grant to buy a duty-free car, together with a monthly $1,160 fuel and maintenance allowance.

Many politicians spend much more on their official and private cars, Kibaki’s ministers especially. Soon after taking power the government spurned its corrupt predecessors’ Mercedes E220 models, and upgraded with the purchase of 32 new vehicles for top officials, including seven for the Office of the President. Most of these were new E240s, while the minister in charge of Kenya’s dilapidated roads, Raila Odinga, went for a customized S500 at a probable cost of $218,000. Kibaki got himself the S600L limousine.

Ministers say they should be paid so well because it stops them taking bribes. Take a look at Kenya’s 2005-06 budget, read out by finance minister David Mwiraria to a cheering parliament in Nairobi in June. According to the local Daily Nation, the government has allocated $6.5-million to buy a fleet of new vehicles for the Office of the President. A further $6.3-million has been set aside for the maintenance of the existing carpool.

Here’s how the WaBenzi get around. Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi have motorcades that can extend a mile long. An African president needs at least 30 cars: the S600L for himself, perhaps two more identical vehicles to confuse assassins, outriders, ministers, yes-men and chase cars bristling with guns. Snarling police in advance vehicles force you off the road for up to an hour before the big man zooms past. In Kenya, I often wonder how much it all costs, to make the capital city, Nairobi, grind to a halt. When almost the entire city police force is ordered to line the roads from State House to the airport, how many rapes, murders and robberies are perpetrated in the slums? When you hear Him coming, the back of your neck tingles as the tension mounts.

Zimbabweans call Mugabe’s motorcade “Bob and the Wailers” on account of the blaring sirens and flashing lights. Woe betide you if you get in the way. Early this year, the Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa visited Mugabe, who picked him up in the five-tonne Mercedes and was heading back to the palace when a lowly motorist stopped too close to the motorcade’s path. In Zimbabwe it is an imprisonable offence to make rude comments or gestures in “view or hearing of the state motorcade.” This man had done neither, but police surrounded him, viciously beat him and then dragged him away.

Mkapa’s police killed a lot of people around the rigged elections in Zanzibar. At home, he has his own motorcade, which in the last five years has been involved in three separate road accidents in which 22 people have died (including a child of three) and 47 others have been seriously injured. Most were pedestrians. Mkapa escaped this road slaughter without a scratch to himself, but no wonder he often chooses to fly in the $32.7-million presidential jet he used state coffers to buy in 2002.

Who benefits from aid? Germany gives the East African Union $17.4-million for the regional organization’s secretariat in Arusha, and the car park is filled with Mercedes-Benzes. Is Germany giving the money just so that it can get it back while giving a bunch of WaBenzi in suits their set of wheels?

Aid has not worked. A Merrill Lynch report estimates there are 100,000 Africans today who owe $829-billion in wealth. At the same time more than 300 million other Africans live on $1 a day. Forget about the gap between north and south. The wealth gap within countries like Kenya is far, far worse than in any other part of the globe.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Africans themselves have always seen the WaBenzi as the symbol of Africa’s ills. The first martyr for the cause was Thomas Sankara, the Burkina Faso president who forced his ministers to swap their Mercedes for Renault 5s. He also made them go on runs. Sankara was overthrown and executed in 1987 by Blaise Campaore, who remains in power today. In 2001 Sam Nujoma of Namibia traded in his Mercedes for a Volvo. He said if all ministers did likewise it would save $1.2-million annually. “We are servants of the Namibian people,” he said. “It is high time that we start behaving as such.”

What a party-pooper – at least until this year, when as part of his huge retirement package he got a S500 worth $174,000 plus two other cars. In 2002 Zambia’s President Levy Mwanawasa went to the airport in a public bus and urged his ministers to do the same. Last year the opposition Ghanaian politician Dr. Edward Nasigre Mahama proposed selling President John Kufuor’s Mercedes to pay for children’s education.

“Get off the corruption thing,” says Bob Geldof. But nobody has got on to it properly yet. Aid-giving nations pretend to be tough on corruption, while African leaders pretend to change. Aid bureaucrats care less about financial probity than the press releases claiming that an economy is on a positive reform track. They are not helping Africa’s young entrepreneurs. By throwing fiscal discipline to the wind and shovelling aid at Africa, the international bureaucrats will fuel a new renaissance in corruption.

Meanwhile, NGOs refuse to focus on corruption. The blame it on Western multinationals. I sometimes wonder if they would prefer to see Africans stay poor so that aid workers could carry on doing good works for them.

Western pundits say the WaBenzi exist because African culture is inherently sick, that black Africans can’t help but admire the Big Men. This does ordinary Africans an injustice. The West needs to help them get better leaders before it increases aid. Make the WaBenzi declare their wealth to their electorates and donors. Name and shame those who drive expensive cars while their people starve. Encourage policies that will create wealth so that the only Africans buying Mercedes-Benzes are honest men and women. Unless this happens, Afica’s new aid package will not alleviate poverty, disease and ignorance. It will mean more flashy limousines.