Capital No More?
There was a story earlier this week that Iran’s government is seriously considering moving its national capital from Teheran, because, apparently:
[it] is in danger of being struck by a major earthquake.
A list of prior capital moves was kindly provided by the BBC:
Brazil: Brasilia, 1961Tanzania: Dodoma, 1973Ivory Coast: Yamoussoukro, 1983Nigeria: Abuja, 1991Kazakhstan: Astana, 1997Burma: Naypyidaw, 2005
The one missing from this list would be:
South Korea: Unnamed, 2004
Apart from South Korea, which has some obvious reasons for moving away from the North Korean border, all the other countries on this list were either dictatorships, or, as in the case of Brazil in the ’60s, were in the midst of an acute period of political and economic instability.
Moving capitals seems to be a means of shifting attention away from obvious problems, political or economic.
Burma is a case in point. According to the CIA, Myanmar sits at a pretty 206 out of 229 on the list of richest/poorest country in the world, and:
…socio-economic conditions have deteriorated because of the regime’s mismanagement of the economy. The economy suffers from serious macroeconomic imbalances – including rising inflation, fiscal deficits, multiple official exchange rates that overvalue the Burmese kyat, a distorted interest rate regime, unreliable statistics…
Brazil was going through a period of political upheaval in the ’50s and ’60s, with multiple changes in government, although it was still a democracy. Tanzania was run by socialists/communists in cohorts with the Chinese. According to Wikipedia:
The socialist regime burned villages and forced people to relocate onto collective farms, which greatly disrupted agricultural efficiency and output
Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Kazakhstan were also autocracies trying to cover up the misdeeds of their governments around the time the new capitals were created.
So, history tells us it is not just earthquakes or other natural causes that precipitate such drastic and unreasonable moves.
