In his book, The Soccer War,
the Polish foreign correspondent, Ryszard Kapuscinski,
writes about "the same drama that every Third World
politician lives through if he is honest, if he is a patriot."
- the essence of the drama lies in the terrible material resistance that
each one encounters, on taking his first, second and third steps up to
the summit of power. Each one wants to do something good and
begins to do it and then sees after a month, after a year, after three years,
that it just isn't happening, that it is slipping away, that it is bogged down
in the sand. Everything is in the way: the centuries of backwardness,
the primitive economy, the illiteracy, the religious fanaticism, the
tribal blindness, the chronic hunger, the colonial past with its practice
of debasing and dulling the conquered, the blackmail by the imperialists,
the greed of the corrupt, the unemployment, the red ink.
Progress comes with great difficulty along such a road.
The politician begins to push too hard.
He looks for a way out through dictatorship.
The dictatorship then fathers an opposition.
The opposition organises a coup.
And the cycle begins anew.
But maybe this is too charitable. Maybe the main thing about power is that it's addictive.
(quoted by Alex Shoumatoff in his article The Fall of the Black States, Vanity Fair Nov. 1991.)
