Skinflint's City Diary
While the Department of Trade's boring inquisitors huff and puff their obscure way along in investigating the affairs of Lonrho, following last year's boardroom row (most likely to be remembered for one of the silliest phrases ever minted for Ted Heath by his pet copywriter Barry Day, about "the unacceptable face of capitalism"), Roland 'Tiny' Rowland, the victor in the battle and still chief of Lonrho, is on his way this week to the Sudan, to witness the opening stages of what is likely to be an African economic miracle.
The situation is that Sudan, though without the kind of wealth in raw materials with which many African and Middle Fristern states are blessed—oil, copper or whatever — is potentially an agricultural giant. Under the sensible administration of President Nimeiri, the Sudanese have begun to grasp this fact, and plans are afoot through massive irrigation schemes to convert undernourished Sudanese soil into an agricultural eldorado. In sugar alone, Sudan will soon outstrip Cuba, and may well be feeding most of Africa — and quite possibly a bit of Europe as well — by the end of the century. Being imaginative, Lonrho has become involved in a project which, besides generating wealth and money, is almost certain to bring practical succour to a large chunk of the starving earth. How absurd it therefore seems in retrospect that both the boring left — represented by the shaggy flagwavers who cried down Rowland's methods of running his business last year — and the boring right -who wanted the company, essentially, to pull out of Africa and concentrate on exciting and challenging tasks like property development at Southend-on-Sea or some such place — ever got a hearing in British newspapers and on British television and radio.
Iranian connections
— who have praised the Shah of Iran in these columns before — have been reading some issues of an English-language newspaper from Persia called Kayahan International. In essence this is a propaganda sheet: every page contains more than one story about what the Shahanshah has been doing or saying, so much so that I hope the poor man is not too strict a Moslem, and can solace his weary throat with some alcoholic beverage or other after each bout in what — so far as I can judge — must be a ceaseless daily round of speech-niaking. However, propaganda or no, the bare facts recorded in the paper indicate how far the Shah has already gone in his ambition to make of his country a great political and economic power.
The economic side of the business being already well under way, the Shah still faces some difficult and disagreeable political decisions. One — as our leader today suggests — lies in his relations with India. Immediately after the India-Pakistani war the Shah flew to Pakistan to console his fellow Moslems: he may now find it more sensible to deal with Mrs Gandhi, and play a part in reconciling India and her western neighbours. Another relates to Zanzibar: the Shah has always been perturbed about the persecution meted out to Persian subjects of the Afro-Shirazi dictatorship there, and his concern has damaged his relations with East African states who want to cauterise Zanzibar through isolation. But potentially the most difficult of the Shah's problems concerns Iran's very curious relations with South Africa.
The South Africans have been storing oil like mad — many disused mine shafts are full of the stuff — in preparation for a decisive struggle with the black nations to the north of them. Iran is one of the very few countries not bothered by ideological problems in selling oil to the Boers. There are sentimental reasons for this: apart from the fact that there are large South African interests in Iran, the Shah's father is buried in South Africa, where there is a huge monument to him, and the Boers have assiduously cultivated what, in the jargon of the modern thriller, one must call the Iranian connection. However, as the Shah becomes more attuned to the realities of modern politics, it seems likely that the connection will be severed; and then South Africa would indeed be in serious trouble.
Bankrupt countnes
Bankruptcy of a nation is not, of course, new. Both Chile, before Admiral Pinochet took over, and Ghana, in the last days 0I Nkrumah, were on'the verge of It. And, reading Paul Johnson's excellent new life of Elizabeth I (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £5.95) I find that, in the sixteenth century, during one of the pauses in their long and exhausting wars, both France and Spain formallY declared themselves bankrupt. I don't know precisely what happened after that — whether, for example, their bankruptcies were ever formally discharged or not. But they do not seem to have done much harm to the rich merchants of Antwerp, who spent so much of their time in those days funding governments. I suppose that nowadays a serious start could bemade on reforming the international monetary system if sone major country, if necessary bY declaring itself bankrupt, withdrew from it.
Bestsellers. I see that the latest set. of transcripts from the Nixon tapes ; have become massive bestsellers overnight. Enough royalties could be raised from their sale, indeed, i easily to pay off President Nixon's back taxes and enable him to put a little by for his retirement in some far-distant sunny clime. Of course, the poor and beleaguered President does not, himself, get the royalties, whiCh go to the American equivalent of Her Majesty's Stationery Office. HMSO are pretty mean with the authors they hire to write the individual volumes in that statelY and massive flow of historical work which they publish. They pay royalties only in the rarest of circumstances, and normallY compel their historians to accept 8 single fee.
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