Living under a dictatorship means being permanently hostage to the risk appetite of the dictator. Transparency and accountability are luxuries for democracies alone.

There is no better illustration of totalitarianism’s failings than China’s infamous ‘Great Leap Forward’ campaign which resulted in the deaths of some 40 million people. The architect, Chairman Mao Zedong, blamed the disaster on the inevitable economic failure of ‘rightists’ trying to reinstate capitalism.