Russia’s status as an emerging market gives rise to caution when discussing the ambitions of companies — state-owned (Gazprom) or private— to broaden their reach globally. Essentially what it boils down to is a perception that the breakneck speed of growth here and relative lack of legal transparency accompanying the quasi market-driven boom means that all that glisters may not, ultimately, be gold.
In strict business terms, though, no one can deny Gazprom’s pivotal position when it comes to supplying gas to Europe. That fact alone prompted one banker involved with lobbying the British government to green-light the Centrica deal to remark: “To quote Lyndon Johnson, it is better to have them inside the tent pissing out rather than outside pissing in.” (Observer, 11.06.05).
Staying with that metaphor, the issue of Zimbabwe and the pros and cons of the country remaining outside the Commonwealth (a decision taken by Robert Mugabe following presidential elections in 2002).
With Mugabe’s blessing (no pun intended), the Bishop of Harare has publicly praised the president from the pulpit at every turn (in return he received a farm and seven-bedroom house overlooking a lake) and started ordaining government ministers and party officials with no theological training, including the country’s vice-president (Sunday Times, 11.06.05).
Six years ago, Zimbabwe’s economy was the continent’s second-most robust after South Africa. Today, it is a proverbial basket case, with inflation topping 1,000 per cent. Four years ago, total government spending was Zim$5 billion. Today, that would fill fewer than 10 supermarket trolleys with groceries.
Which brings us back to that tent analogy (aka inclusiveness). Mugabe might have unilaterally withdrawn Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth. But the best the club claims it can do is claim that, because the country is no longer a member, its activities are, effectively, beyond the organisation’s remit.
Poppycock. The Commonwealth is the only multilateral group whose members enjoy equal status regardless of their size. Small members can present their causes and, having won support, expect larger countries to back them in organisations like the IMF and World Bank.
It was good enough for the Commonwealth to stand together as one against Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain under a constitution depriving black Zimbabweans of rights in their own country. Mr Mugabe came to power precisely because the Commonwealth persuaded the UK and US governments to reject Smith and contemplate independence for the country under majority rule. So why the deafening silence, now the tables have turned?
Mugabe has corrupted his courts and now the church. Collectively, the Commonwealth must persuade him to hold free and fair elections, while lobbying the World Bank to fund those parties (i.e. the Opposition) which meet clear guidelines for openness and transparency. The time for standing passively by and letting a population implode has long since passed. Or is this another case of proving the critics right — that the Commonwealth is a mere talk-fest, whose members gather to quaff canapis and mouth platitudes every few years?
Leaving the calm of the countryside to return to the crash-through-or-crash bustle of Moscow, I had a deju vu moment at Smolenskaya-Sennay Square — a location recorded in Andrew Jack’s Inside Putin’s Russia: “Russian driving is reckless and needs some control. Whenever I walked…I occasionally leapt out of the way as one drove past me on to the pavement to bypass the traffic jams.” Leaping to my own safety reminded me of boarding a flight in Dubai to Moscow, following the first boarding call for “parents with children”. Cue a stampede for the gate, as passengers flagrantly ignored the distinction. Russians live for the moment — conscious, it seems, that what they have could be whipped away at any moment. But then you have to live here to really understand what I mean. Such is the riddle that is Russia.
