13.
WHY NATIONS FAIL TODAY
H OW TO W IN THE L OTTERY IN Z IMBABWE
I T WAS J ANUARY 2000 in Harare, Zimbabwe. Master of
Ceremonies Fallot Chawawa was in charge of drawing the
winning ticket for the national lottery organized by a partly
state-owned bank, the Zimbabwe Banking Corporation
(Zimbank). The lottery was open to all clients who had kept
five thousand or more Zimbabwe dollars in their accounts
during December 1999. When Chawawa drew the ticket,
he was dumfounded. As the public statement of Zimbank
put it, “Master of Ceremonies Fallot Chawawa could hardly
believe his eyes when the ticket drawn for the Z$100,000
prize was handed to him and he saw His Excellency RG
Mugabe written on it.”
President Robert Mugabe, who had ruled Zimbabwe by
hook or by crook, and usually with an iron fist, since 1980,
had won the lottery, which was worth a hundred thousand
Zimbabwe dollars, about five times the annual per capita
income of the country. Zimbank claimed that Mr. Mugabe’s
name had been drawn from among thousands of eligible
customers. What a lucky man! Needless to say he didn’t
really need the money. Mugabe had in fact only recently
awarded himself and his cabinet salary hikes of up to 200
percent.
The lottery ticket was just one more indication of
Zimbabwe’s extractive institutions. One could call this
corruption, but it is just a symptom of the institutional
malaise in Zimbabwe. The fact that Mugabe could even win
the lottery if he wanted showed how much control he had
over matters in Zimbabwe, and gave the world a glimpse of
the extent of the country’s extractive institutions.
The most common reason why nations fail today is
because they have extractive institutions. Zimbabwe under
Mugabe’s regime vividly illustrates the economic and social