Why Nations Fail

part of the old order. Then, around 1978, all
that began to change. Gradually materialism
became accepted, then required. Designer
clothes from the best European tailors were
the uniform of all senior government officials
and members of the Military Council. We had
the best of everything: the best homes, the
best cars, the best whiskey, champagne,
food. It was a complete reversal of the ideals
of the Revolution.
Giorgis also vividly recorded how Mengistu changed
once he became sole ruler:
The real Mengistu emerged: vengeful, cruel
and authoritarian … Many of us who used to
talk to him with hands in our pockets, as if he

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were one of us, found ourselves standing
stiffly to attention, cautiously respectful in his
presence. In addressing him we had always
used the familiar form of “you,” 
ante;
now we
found ourselves switching to the more formal
“you,” 
ersiwo
. He moved into a bigger, more
lavish office in the Palace of Menelik … He
began using the Emperor’s cars … We were
supposed to have a revolution of equality;
now he had become the new Emperor.
The pattern of vicious circle depicted by the transition
between Haile Selassie and Mengistu, or between the
British colonial governors of Sierra Leone and Siaka
Stevens, is so extreme and at some level so strange that it
deserves a special name. As we already mentioned in
chapter 4
, the German sociologist Robert Michels called it
the iron law of oligarchy. The internal logic of oligarchies,
and in fact of all hierarchical organizations, is that, argued
Michels, they will reproduce themselves not only when the
same group is in power, but even when an entirely new
group takes control. What Michels did not anticipate
perhaps was an echo of Karl Marx’s remark that history
repeats itself—the first time as tragedy, the second time as
farce.
It is not only that many of the postindependence leaders
of Africa moved into the same residences, made use of the
same patronage networks, and employed the same ways
of manipulating markets and extracting resources as had
the colonial regimes and the emperors they replaced; but
they also made things worse. It was indeed a farce that the
staunchly anticolonial Stevens would be concerned with
controlling the same people, the Mende, whom the British
had sought to control; that he would rely on the same chiefs
whom the British had empowered and then used to control
the hinterland; that he would run the economy in the same
way, expropriating the farmers with the same marketing
boards and controlling the diamonds under a similar
monopoly. It was indeed a farce, a very sad farce indeed,
that Laurent Kabila, who mobilized an army against
Mobutu’s dictatorship with the promise of freeing the
people and ending the stifling and impoverishing corruption

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and repression of Mobutu’s Zaire, would then set up a
regime just as corrupt and perhaps even more disastrous. It
was certainly farcical that he tried to start a Mobutuesque
personality cult aided and abetted by Dominique Sakombi
Inongo, previously Mobutu’s minister of information, and
that Mobutu’s regime was itself fashioned on patterns of
exploitation of the masses that had started more than a
century previously with King Leopold’s Congo Free State. It
was indeed a farce that the Marxist officer Mengistu would
start living in a palace, viewing himself as an emperor, and
enriching himself and his entourage just like Haile Selassie
and other emperors before him had done.
It was all a farce, but also more tragic than the original
tragedy, and not only for the hopes that were dashed.
Stevens and Kabila, like many other rulers in Africa, would
start murdering their opponents and then innocent citizens.
Mengistu and the Derg’s policies would bring recurring
famine to Ethiopia’s fertile lands. History was repeating
itself, but in a very distorted form. It was a famine in Wollo
province in 1973 to which Haile Selassie was apparently
indifferent that did so much finally to solidify opposition to
his regime. Selassie had at least been only indifferent.
Mengistu instead saw famine as a political tool to
undermine the strength of his opponents. History was not
only farcical and tragic, but also cruel to the citizens of
Ethiopia and much of sub-Saharan Africa.
The essence of the iron law of oligarchy, this particular
facet of the vicious circle, is that new leaders overthrowing
old ones with promises of radical change bring nothing but
more of the same. At some level, the iron law of oligarchy is
harder to understand than other forms of the vicious circle.
There is a clear logic to the persistence of the extractive
institutions in the U.S. South and in Guatemala. The same
groups continued to dominate the economy and the politics
for centuries. Even when challenged, as the U.S. southern
planters were after the Civil War, their power remained
intact and they were able to keep and re-create a similar
set of extractive institutions from which they would again
benefit. But how can we understand those who come to
power in the name of radical change re-creating the same
system? The answer to this question reveals, once again,
that the vicious circle is stronger than it first appears.

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Not all radical changes are doomed to failure. The
Glorious Revolution was a radical change, and it led to
what perhaps turned out to be the most important political
revolution of the past two millennia. The French Revolution
was even more radical, with its chaos and excessive
violence and the ascent of Napoleon Bonaparte, but it did
not re-create the 
ancien régime
.
Three factors greatly facilitated the emergence of more
inclusive political institutions following the Glorious
Revolution and the French Revolution. The first was new
merchants and businessmen wishing to unleash the power
of creative destruction from which they themselves would
benefit; these new men were among the key members of
the revolutionary coalitions and did not wish to see the
development of yet another set of extractive institutions that
would again prey on them.
The second was the nature of the broad coalition that
had formed in both cases. For example, the Glorious
Revolution wasn’t a coup by a narrow group or a specific
narrow interest, but a movement backed by merchants,
industrialists, the gentry, and diverse political groupings.
The same was largely true for the French Revolution.
The third factor relates to the history of English and
French political institutions. They created a background
against which new, more inclusive regimes could develop.
In both countries there was a tradition of parliaments and
power sharing going back to the Magna Carta in England
and to the Assembly of Notables in France. Moreover, both
revolutions happened in the midst of a process that had
already weakened the grasp of the absolutist, or aspiring
absolutist, regimes. In neither case would these political
institutions make it easy for a new set of rulers or a narrow
group to take control of the state and usurp existing
economic wealth and build unchecked and durable political
power. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, a narrow
group under the leadership of Robespierre and Saint-Just
did take control, with disastrous consequences, but this
was temporary and did not derail the path toward more
inclusive institutions. All this contrasts with the situation of
societies with long histories of extreme extractive
economic and political institutions, and no checks on the
power of rulers. In these societies, there would be no new

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strong merchants or businessmen supporting and
bankrolling the resistance against the existing regime in