How to buy a country

31 July 2000

Many of you would like to have a country. To realize this ambition in the past, you needed a good family name and a big army. But times have changed. Today we live in the age of markets. All you need is money. The technique is still a bit tricky. But if you follow this easy 10-point guide, you should be able to purchase a country.

1. Get a monopoly. A handful is even better. In the past, you could generate the necessary funds by mere crime—smuggling oil, stripping forests, running drugs, hosting illegal gambling. That’s still fine if your ambitions run no higher than your own province or a part-share in the Ministry of Interior. But to secure a country, you need the spectacular profit levels of monopolies.

2. Wait for a crisis. A full-strength financial disaster will lower the price level and take most of your competitors out of the market. You might want to bring in the IMF as a strategic partner because they’re really the experts on making these as bad as possible. You just have to make sure that your investment funds get less damaged than everybody else’s. So get access to the necessary insider information.

3. Recruit an appealing start-up team. This should be very broadly based, with something to appeal to everyone. Two bankers. A couple of ex-finance ministers. A few professors. A general or two. A handful of idealists. This is not difficult as there are lots of these people around and many are endearingly naive and easily flattered. Don’t worry about the long term. Most of them will fade away when things get more serious.

4. Get a marketing team. Ideally the key people should have experience in marketing political products in the past. Don’t worry that your product is very different to what they have handled before (sometimes this is called "ideology"). These marketeers get bored easily. They like the challenge of handling something which is new. If you’re rather pasty looking and a boring speaker, that only increases the challenge and makes them more creative and hard-working.

5. Put up pictures of yourself in every available space throughout the country. Heads of state have traditionally smothered countries with their image after acquiring power. Now it’s a way of establishing prior right of ownership. Of course all this clutter messes up the natural environment. And you may be embarrassed at seeing yourself everywhere frozen in some fatuous pose. But remember, this is politics in the age of markets. This strategy works for laundry detergent, fizzy drinks, and female underwear. It’ll work for you.

6. Buy every politician that’s not nailed down. This is where point 2 (waiting for a crisis) really starts to pay off. Many will be hard-up or deeply in debt. Many will be rightly worried about their own personal safety if they fail to keep up the usual payments to their armies of hangers-on. It helps too if there has been a long time since the last election. The future will be more unpredictable. Many politicians will be feeling very insecure. But you must never buy politicians with a one-off payment. Instalment systems are much safer and more effective. And keep the big instalments to the end. These so-called "fertiliser formulas", like 2-3-5-15-15, are much misunderstood. The big figures are not very serious and you don’t need to include them in your cost projections. Most politicians are gamblers. They are mesmerised by the idea of "the big one", the jackpot. You can exploit this by offering something that is always "over the rainbow".

7. Promise, promise, promise. Cash is not the only currency you have for buying up politicians. Some can be bought by the promise of good jobs which offer status, indemnity, and revenue opportunities. You may actually have rather few of such good jobs to offer. But don’t worry. They’re recyclable. You can offer each job to many different people. Of course these rivals will find out about this because people like to boast and the press loves stirring this sort of thing up. But history has shown this is manageable. These rivals won’t start open warfare before the election because they don’t want to screw up even a fractional chance. And after the polls, the scrapping will look messy but won’t matter a bit.

8. Buy a bank and a TV station. Close to the polls, when cash management becomes critical, banks become really useful. In the past you could rely on strategic partnerships for this service. But lately politicians have not done a good job of looking after the bankers, so you might need a strategic stake to make sure of things. Television stations are only just coming onto the market, and their utility is a bit unknown. But simply as a block on your rivals, buy a bit of any that become available.

9. Don’t touch the money. The former Japanese premier, Tanaka, liked to keep big bundles of yen stacked in his house and handed them out like bricks. This method is ideal because politicians are always seduced by the look, smell and feel of real money. But in these days of elections commissions and anti-corruption bodies, this technique has become too risky. Use electronic transfers, preferably offshore, and have a staff to handle them (wives are useful here). Then you can always face the press, put on your most angelic face, say something like "I have never bought anyone", and still return in your next life as something no worse than a toad.

10. Repeat endlessly the well-known formula: "I have never used money to buy politicians and votes. My opponents accuse me of such things because it is what they do themselves." Nobody will notice the circular logic. People expect to hear you say this, so don’t let them down.