Gitau Warigi
22 June 2008
Nairobi — Arrogant, self-important, conceited, rude - what the English simply call "a pain." These are just a few of the epithets used to describe Mark Thatcher, the son of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
The low regard in which he is held could explain the remarkable lack of outrage being shown from anywhere, including from supposed "friends," even after his name got linked to a scandal that has broken up his family and made him a sort of international pariah.
Described as a businessman (though the business mostly associated with him was fixing deals using the name of his famous mother when she was in power), the younger Thatcher has been implicated in a bungled operation to overthrow the leader of Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang Nguema.
A British mercenary, Simon Mann, who is currently on trial in the Equatorial Guinea capital of Malabo over the coup plot, has confessed to his involvement, and in an interview with Britain's Channel 4 TV, implicated Thatcher as well.
In mitigation, Mann claims he was a "mere instrument," not a main organiser. A statement from Thatcher suggested Mann's current plight had prompted him to make "wild allegations."
Special forces officer
Mann, a former special forces officer who attended the elite Eton school, has long been friends with Thatcher, who went to the equally elite Harrow school. An international arrest warrant from Malabo is out for Thatcher, who is said to be somewhere in the south of Spain.
It is a long time since the era when you could slap together a couple of helicopters, push inside a dozen armed mercenaries and hop into a little African outpost and topple its leader.
The '60s were popularised by books such as Dogs of War and The Wild Geese. No more the likes of "Mad Mike" Hoare, the South African or Frenchman Bob Denard, who would routinely overthrow regimes in the Comoros, or pop up in trouble spots like DR Congo and Biafra, Nigeria.
They had since been commissioned out of business either by age or, in Denard's case, death. Their services had, anyway, ceased to matter following the reform of the shadowy intelligence services that used to hire them.
The caper in Equatorial Guinea is straight out of the old movie. In truth, nobody gave a damn about the tiny former Spanish colony (it lies in the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa) until oil was discovered there in 1996 in copious quantities.
In 2000, Thatcher tried to do business with Obiang. Through a company called Cogito, which he had set up ostensibly to provide security advice and intelligence information to multinational companies in Africa, he offered Obiang a £134,000 (Sh17 million) contract to gather intelligence on his opponents and draw up threat assessments.
Thatcher hoped it would lead to securing valuable oil concessions but, in the end, Obiang rejected the offer. The nature of Thatcher's so-called business savvy is considered a mystery, as is the source of his estimated £64 million (Sh8 billion) fortune.
At Harrow, he was nicknamed "Thickie Mork" for being dim academically, and he gave up a career in accountancy after failing his examination three times.
The Equatorial Guinea coup adventure appears to have been dreamed up in 2003 when Mann met Severo Moto, Obiang's political opponent exiled in Madrid, Spain.
Mann agreed to recruit a mercenary force for the overthrow of Obiang in return for £10 million (Sh1.26 billion) plus a share in future oil revenues and 30 per cent of all assets recovered from the Obiang family. The planning seems to have shifted to South Africa, where Mann was residing.
One of Mann's neighbours and friends in the posh Cape Town suburb of Constantia was Thatcher, who had moved there in 1995. (Princess Diana's brother Earl Spencer also lives in Constantia, but evidently he steered clear of the seedier aspects of his fellow Englishmen's lives).
At some point Thatcher fell in with Mann's conspiracy. He actually committed $500,000 (Sh31 million) in Mann's venture through what was covered up as an "investment" in an air ambulance company.
The conspirators appear to have gone about their recruitment business rather carelessly. Inevitably, the South African intelligence service got wind of the plot and promptly alerted Britain, Spain and the US.
Why the three countries did not dissuade Mann and his alleged co-conspirators against the plot is odd unless they too hoped to see Obiang's end.
Zimbabwean intelligence also came to learn of the plot. The plotters had designated Harare a way station where they would clandestinely pick up a stash of weapons en route to Malabo.
Recruited mercenaries
When the 64 recruited South African mercenaries landed in Harare on July 7, 2004, they were arrested by Zimbabwean intelligence agents. Mann, who had entered the country, was picked up, too.
Meanwhile, in South Africa things were unravelling. An elite crime squad called the Scorpions raided Thatcher's Constantia mansion and placed him under arrest. After a plea bargain, he pleaded guilty to "unwittingly" abetting the coup.
He was fined 3 million rand (Sh23.5 million), given a suspended four-year jail term and obliged to leave South Africa where he had lived for a decade.
He was lucky he got away lightly, or at least that is how the African National Congress youth wing saw it in what it described as "an abomination and miscarriage of justice."
After capturing him, the Zimbabweans jailed Mann for four years for illegal possession of firearms. On completion of the sentence early this year, he was extradited to Equatorial Guinea for the current trial.
Thatcher's own life was falling apart. His American wife, Diane, left him and later filed for divorce. She thought the Equatorial Guinea adventure to be especially daft.
She was also fed up with his infidelities, having caught him cheating twice. His access to his children, who are with his ex-wife in the US, was effectively cut off because, having a criminal conviction, he cannot get a visa to enter the US.
After being told to leave South Africa, Thatcher was adrift. He stayed with his mother in London for a while before moving on. But each of his favoured destinations - Monaco, France and Switzerland - were unwelcoming.
He currently is on shaky residence in Spain where his landlord, a schoolmate at Harrow, badly wants to evict him, complaining that he is always late with the rent.
When his mother was prime minister, many of her underlings considered the son and his "consultancy" ventures a liability. But Mrs Thatcher had a blind spot for him.
A rallying enthusiast, he once got lost in the Sahara during a Paris-Dakar rally and made his famously tough mother, the Iron Lady, crack and cry in public.
The Sunday Times magazine quoted Mrs Thatcher's Downing Street press secretary Bernhard Ingham as giving the ultimate English put-down to the son. Asked how Mark could help in an upcoming prime ministerial re-election campaign, Ingham famously quipped: "Leave the country."
Younger Thatcher has since remarried. The new woman in his life, Lady Francis Russell, is one of those his ex-wife says she caught him cheating with. Carol, Thatcher's twin sister and only sibling, did not attend the wedding, held in Gilbraltar. They have not spoken for years.
Heavy security has been deployed in Malabo for Mann's trial amid local fears that one of the accused's alleged co-conspirators, a London-based Lebanese millionaire called Ely Calil, could be plotting to silence Mann using sophisticated gadgetry - James Bond-style.
People attending the trial, mostly foreign media, are not allowed to wear shoes or long-sleeved shirts, or carry mobile phones, notebooks or pens.
According to prosecutor Jose Pablo Nvo, Calil had helped to finance the coup plot to the tune of $2 million (Sh252 million).
Mann faces a total of 32 years in jail if convicted. Whether guilty or not, chances that Thatcher will be extradited to Malabo are remote. In any case, the European Union has no extradition treaty with Equatorial Guinea.
Obiang, who has been in power since 1979 following a bloody coup, is no angel either.
But he is probably canny enough to know that even if Thatcher miraculously fell on his lap, jailing a son of the Iron Lady, however crooked he is, could bring about queer relations with a powerful European country.
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