Turkmenistan's dictator had billions in gas money. His people got poverty. His statue got gold, and it turned all day to follow the sun.
He renamed January after himself and April after his mother. Then he renamed the word for bread after her too. Then he closed every hospital outside the capital.
His name was Saparmurat Niyazov. In 2005 a TV crew got into his country, and the video below shows what one man can build when nobody can say no.
And nobody could. He made himself president for life, and every year his parliament stood up to cheer him.
With that power came the money: gas worth tens of billions of dollars, all of it under his personal control. A watchdog said about $3 billion sat in a German bank. The bank denied it.
So he built for himself. A $12 million tower for his gold statue. A marble mosque in his home village with lines from his own book on the walls.
That book was the Ruhnama. Children learned it at school. You needed it for a driver's license.
Ordinary people got his book, not his money. Before the hospitals closed, he had already fired 15,000 health workers.
That lasted until he died in 2006. The man who took over was his health minister, a dentist. The dentist moved the statue that followed the sun out of the center, then put up a gold statue of himself on a horse.
The face on the gold changed. Who got the gold didn't.
So was Niyazov just one madman with too much money, or does a country this rich in gas always end up with one man at the top?