Alim Gelyastanov writes for Bankable Insight:
President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe
Although not exactly a historical leader, President of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe is a relic from the failed past and one of the “best” examples of how to ruin a well functioning economy in quick and easy steps.
After a bloody civil war, the black majority took charge of Rhodesia in 1980, which was renamed Zimbabwe. A nationalist leader and Marxist terrorist, Robert Mugabe, became President.
Rhodesia was one of the most prosperous countries in Africa. Mugabe inherited a country with extensive infrastructure, advanced agriculture, and vast natural resources.
The country’s economy used to be the fastest growing in all of Africa; now it is the fastest shrinking. At one time it was a net exporter of corn, cotton, beef, tobacco, roses, and sugarcane; now it exports only its refugees and emigrants, who are fleeing by the tens of thousands. Although Zimbabwe has some of the richest farmland in Africa, malnutrition and starvation are now commonplace.
Mugabe destroyed the nation’s productivity, played the race card to incite violence against the white minority who were the country’s engine of growth, expropriated farmland, crushed dissent, created an atmosphere of lawlessness, caused an astronomical rate of inflation, scared off foreign investors, invaded the Congo, committed a genocide against the Ndebele people, and allowed HIV to infect a third of the population of Zimbabwe. Life expectancy dropped as a result, from 56years-old in the early seventies, to an abhorring 35 years-old today.
The future of Zimbabwe is grim. As long as dictators like Mugabe are tolerated by their own people and the outside world, as long as they are allowed to blame their own disastrous policies on Western imperialism and colonialism, while receiving and squandering foreign aid, the Mugabes of the world, under different names and different disguises will keep happening.
President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela
Hugo Chavez was the President of Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013. He followed his own political ideology of Chavismo, a mixture of Latin American paternalistic governance, embodied through the wordMachismo, meaning strong and masculine, and Marxist socialism.
He used the nationalized oil revenues to provide food subsidies and price controls, which resulted in massive shortages of goods across Venezuela since low profits could not sustain paying for imports. Large purchases of foreign goods and lower reserves contributed to subsequent shortages of dollars necessary for such large imports. The crime and the murder rate increased greatly under Chavez’s presidency, as well as corruption in the police and the government. In the face of his failed economic policies, Chavez had to rely on the intense government propaganda and the enabling acts.
Chavez made Venezuela overly dependent on oil exports and extremely vulnerable to the fluctuating hydrocarbon prices. By 2012 96% of the country’s exports and half of its revenue relied on oil production, and more recently exports of everything but oil collapsed.
As a result of Chavez’s policies, inflation rose and widespread shortages occurred. The situation has worsened under the current government of Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro.Food shortages and the lack of basic amenities, combined with the falling oil prices has created a full blown economic crisis.
Vladimir Lenin of Russia/USSR
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian communist revolutionary who served as head of the new Bolshevik government from 1917 until his death in 1924. He laid the foundations of modern dictatorship and consolidated the state imprisonment of a whole society, its economy, and its culture.
Despite the hardships of war which Russia suffered in 1916-17, the country remained a relatively prosperous, rapidly modernizing country with a growing industrialist capitalist economy and massive agriculture.
After Lenin and his Bolsheviks Party took power in a violent coup at the end of 1917, they unleashed a reign of terror. The Red Terror led to the Civil War and a massive famine of 1921, which left six million Russians dead.
To keep the Red Army fed, and to avoid economic collapse, the Bolshevik government established war communism, food requisitioning from the peasantry, for little or no payment, which peasants resisted with reduced harvests.
The war communism resulted in armed confrontations, with the secret police and Red Army suppressing the rebellions with shooting hostages, poison gas, and concentration camps. A black market emerged in Russia, despite the threat of the martial law against profiteering. The ruble collapsed,barter began to increasingly replace money as a medium of exchange and, by 1921, heavy industry had fallen to output levels of 20% of those in 1913. Coal production decreased from 27.5 million tons to 7 million tons , while overall factory production also declined by 90%. The grain harvest was also slashed from 80.1 million tons to 46.5 million tons .
In 1922, with the Russian economy laying in total ruin, Lenin was forced to implement the New Economic Policy which allowed state capitalism and private enterprise. The policy revived the Russian economy and greatly increased the agricultural production after the devastating effects of war communism until it was abolished by Stalin in 1928, in favor of collectivization.
Pharaoh Khufu of Egypt
Khufu was a Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt’s Old Kingdom. He reigned from around 2589 to 2566 BC. Khufu was the second pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty. He is generally accepted as being the builder of the Great Pyramid of Giza, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
Khufu is a primary example of the excesses of big government and megalomania. He virtually enslaved his people to complete his monumental but economically useless construction projects, and as a result emptied the state coffers. Although this kind of tyrannical rule was the norm rather than exception in the ancient world, his economic policies were so harsh and absurd, they brought the country to a financial ruin toward the end of his reign. It was even said that Khufu sent one of his daughters to work as a prostitute in order to generate more revenues to build the pyramid.
Khufu’s increased burden of taxation and his cruel tyranny brought misery to the common people. So great was their hatred of the Pharaoh, they couldn’t even bear to mention his name.
Emperor Alexander Severus of Rome
Severus Alexander was Roman Emperor from AD 222 to 235. The earlier part of Alexander’s reign was benign as he inherited a prosperous empire, but the end of his rule was marked by the Crisis of the Third Century, which brought half a century of civil strife, foreign wars, and collapse of the economy.
Alexander was young, immature, and inexperienced boy when he ascended the throne, he knew little about government and the role of ruling over an empire. Because of this, throughout his entire reign he was a puppet of his family’s bad advice and entirely under their jurisdiction, a prospect that was not popular among the people and the soldiers.
Toward the end of his reign the empire faced hyperinflation caused by years of coinage devaluation. He enlarged the army by one quarter and doubled the soldiers’ base pay. He needed ways to raise money quickly to pay the military’s “accession bonus” and the easiest way to do so was by inflating the coinage severely, a process made possible by debasing it with bronze and copper.
This had the predictable effect of causing runaway rises in prices, and by the end of the third century the old coinage of the Roman Empire had nearly collapsed, and trade was carried out through barter. This resulted in the disruption and the eventual collapse of the extensive internal trade.
Qianlong Emperor of China
The Qianlong Emperor was the sixth emperor in the Manchu Qing Dynasty who ruled over China from 1735 to 1796. Although his early years saw the continuation of an era of relative prosperity in China, his final years saw troubles at home and abroad.
China was increasingly lagging behind the West, but instead of modernizing the country and reforming inept governance, the Qianlong Emperor busied himself with a military expansion of his empire. It was also a very expensive enterprise. The funds in the Imperial Treasury were almost all put into military expeditions. As a result the economy suffered, and the decline in living standards was immense. The Qing Dynasty’s overall contempt for commerce, foreign trade, and technological innovations, as well as its isolationism and self-absorbed imperial arrogance had also contributed to its eventual downfall.
In his later years Qianlong gave free reign to the corrupt officials whose personal fortunes exceeded that of the country’s depleted treasury. Qianlong began his reign with about 33,950,000 taels of silver in Treasury surplus. However, due to long term embezzlement and corruption by officials, frequent wars and rebellions, huge palace constructions, as well as his own extravagant lifestyle, all of these cost the treasury a total of 150,200,000 silver taels. This misrule and the lack of political reforms ushered the beginning of the gradual decline and eventual demise of the Qing dynasty and empire.
Read more- 10 Historical Leaders Who Financially Ruined Their Countries