Word: mobutu
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...There is hope that Bongo's death may help set a new pattern for Africa, opening the way for a new era of reform and shared prosperity. Across the continent, the old "Big Men" dinosaurs are dying off. Gone are Idi Amin of Uganda, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaïre, Hastings Banda of Malawi and Charles Taylor of Liberia. Those that remain are precariously long in the tooth: Libya's Muammar Gaddafi has been in power for 39 years, while Dos Santos of Angola and Obiang of Equatorial Guinea have ruled for 29 and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe...
Wrong has covered Africa for the Financial Times and other news organizations since the 1990s. As with her 2001 book, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz, a well-received account of the calamitous rule of Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko, It's Our Turn to Eat - the title refers to the assumption in Kenya that winning elections confers a license to steal - is richly reported and reads, at times, like a thriller. Wrong's sketches of Githongo's sleuthing - when a hidden recording device starts playing back while he is still in the company of two top officials...
...pattern that has been particularly pronounced in Africa, whose post-independence history has been dominated by Big Men, despots like Mobutu Sese Seko, ruler of Zaire for 32 years, who took the country as personal reward for "liberating" it. But it is also observed around the world. A tide of leftwing revolt in Latin America, China and Southeast Asia left much of the same sour legacy of totalitarianism. In India, the Gandhi family has towered over its democracy for 60 years. In the Middle East, after helping broker a historic peace deal with Israel in 1993, Yasser Arafat's Fatah...
...came a full-scale war involving a plethora of rebel groups, some Hutu, some Tutsi, some Congolese, some criminal mercenaries - as well as Congo's national army and the world's largest U.N. peacekeeping mission. In 1997 the rebels of Congo's Laurent Kabila managed to overthrow then President Mobutu Sese Seko and install Kabila as President. Later, Kabila's son Joseph took the reins when his father was assassinated. But none of them managed to end the war in the east. (See pictures of Congo on the brink...
...admiring Richard Murphy, who worked with Oakley during the Reagan Administration. Oakley's penchant for stating, in his soft Louisiana drawl, exactly what he thinks can get him into trouble. As Ambassador to Zaire, he was nearly kicked out of the country when his unvarnished reports angered President Mobutu Sese Seko. ''He doesn't say thank you. He doesn't say please. It's just, boom: get the job done and go,'' says an American diplomat in Mogadishu. In Somalia, getting the job done involved landing, unarmed and virtually alone, ahead of U.S. troops last December as George Bush...