Mondli Makhanya: The downfall of Muammar Gaddafi will bring to an end the reign of one of the world's truly crazy leaders.

Modern history has had its fair share of madmen who visited tremendous misery on their citizens and others beyond their borders.

There was Adolf Hitler, who sparked a world war and deliberately set about exterminating a people because he personally believed they were bad. There was Pol Pot, whose romantic dream of an agrarian society led to him emptying Cambodian cities and driving urban populations to the countryside. Hundreds of thousands died of starvation while hundreds of thousand more were killed by his security forces.

The Soviet Union had Josef Stalin, whose paranoia saw him execute thousands and whose disastrous policies killed millions.

There was Chile's Augusto Pinochet who, along with other Latin American dictators, perfected the art of death squads and making people vanish. There was Idi Amin, a delusional man whose reign brought Uganda to its knees. More recently the world's most powerful nation brought us George W Bush, whose lies and thirst for war led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and resulted in the world being a much more dangerous place than his enemies could have made it.

And then of course, we have ol' Robert Mugabe, who has presided over the most spectacular disintegration of a functioning country since the Weimar Republic. (By the way, as the north Africans have been taking their destiny into their own hands, the people of Zimbabwe are still moaning about how Thabo Mbeki let them down. Ya neh!)

But all of these men do not hold a candle to Gaddafi. They were ruthless and crazy in pursuit of their warped visions, but none could be classified mad in the Gaddafi sense. In a normal society the Brother Leader would have been locked up in an asylum or would be wandering the streets having entertaining conversations with himself. He would have got nowhere near the levers of power.

Instead the people of Libya and the leaders of the world tolerated his lunacy. Heads of state shared podiums and high tables with him. He even got to address the United Nations, the African Union and the Arab League. Serious leaders sat and listened to him ramble on in his funny outfits.

My first encounter with Gaddafi was in 2000 at the first Africa-Europe summit in Egypt. This was the first time since the end of colonialism that the leaders of the European Union and the then Organisation of African Unity had sat down to thrash out the relationship between the two continents.

Serious stuff was on the table: trade, investment, aid, reparations, migration and loads of issues that bedevilled relations or presented opportunities for better relations.

When Gaddafi took to the podium he nearly derailed the summit by launching into a long, convoluted tirade against the West. Ministers and diplomats coming out of the closed session were in stitches as they recounted his ranting and imitated his every action. Yes, it was funny but the bottom line was that a madman had hijacked the most important gathering between Africans and Europeans since the two peoples first came into contact. Between the mirth, there was much anger that he was undermining Africa's agenda with his antics.

But veterans of international gatherings wrote off his ranting and worked hard to get the show back on the road. By then he had become the clowning fixture. In every country he has gone to the locals will tell you about how this lunatic would arrive and pitch a tent at the presidential guest house or hotel lawn instead of sleeping in a proper abode, bring his own camel milk, go into the villages and spray the locals with fistfuls of dollars and lecture roadside audiences about his dream of a United States of Africa (of which he would be president).

So why did the world's political community, which normally does not suffer fools, tolerate this madman?

Short answer: he paid a lot of people good money.

He had many presidents, prime ministers and kings on his payroll. He also filled the coffers of some nations and financed the election campaigns of many parties. If you ventured into downtown Johannesburg and visited some important political buildings you may well have heard interesting stories about bags that were brought back from visits to Tripoli.

It explains Africa's failure to loudly condemn the slaughter on the streets of Libyan cities - and the mealy-mouthed statements from a certain building in central Johannesburg about the Libyan government and the people "seeking a political solution" when civilians were being butchered. It is not easy to condemn a paymaster without qualifying your condemnation.

A lunatic like Gaddafi should never have been allowed to hide behind the fig leaf of national sovereignty and rule an oil-rich nation for more than 40 years. We may all laugh at him and condemn him, but we should be laughing at and condemning ourselves.