airport
I was recently at the airport with my friend. For those of you who have never visited that Dakar airport, I can say that it gives you a pretty accurate idea of what the country is like. The last time I was there, I was waiting for the bus and a pack of goats just walked by, a couple feet from the entrance. Never mind the beggars straying the entrance and the never-finished construction or the lack of working monitors relaying flight information, or the fact that the power went out. This post is not about the airport. It’s about corruption.
My Lebanese friend had a couple of friends visit from France, and for the occasion, he brought with him a roll of Euro notes. How big was the roll? Fat. For those of you wondering why he brought with him all this money, the fact is that it’s illegal to move more than $5,000 of money out of the country at any given time. But if you come into Senegal and declare your monetary bringings upon you’re arrival, why, it wouldn’t make sense that you would be allowed to go out with any less than you brought in. And if you could conveniently get your hands on a roll of euro notes, say, in the outside bathroom of the airport before going through the declaration section of customs, when you leave…
My friend did not have to bribe anyone to make the scheme work. Due to sheer laziness on the part of the authorities, you can leave the airport, come back, and then go through a customs declaration, which doesn’t matter anyways because the customs agents won’t bother to check the validity of the form.
The simple fact is that the capital controls are not in place due to corruption. They are a futile tool used to maintain fixed exchange rates, which is itself a futile policy that hasn’t been corrected in the 47 years since independence. Likewise, corruption didn’t do the airport in: forty years of mismanagement and poor planning did. So why do people blame corruption for Africa’s ills, instead of horrible policies and mismanagement?
Probably because Africa is corrupt, and corruption is “BAD”. Instead of thinking of corruption as a problem, for a change, let’s think of it as a solution.
Your building permit will take nine months just to be processed? Pay four hundred dollars and it’ll be done by the end of the week.
The grading system unfairly kicks students out of school? Nothing that can’t be settled with a twenty dollar payment to the proper administrator.
Don’t have insurance, a driver’s license, or proper vehicle registration? Vehicle very much unfit for passenger transport? Two dollars will get you out of a police checkpoint.
And so corruption flourishes. There are two types of corruption: paying to get something positive done and paying to prevent something bad from happening. The vast majority of the population sees neither of these forms. For them, corruption is essentially irrelevant, since they pay no taxes and will never demand any of the services facilitated through bribery.
Corruption exists because just about nobody wants to see corruption end. Paying to get something positive done is like paying an expedited fee to get a passport quickly; more cost, less hassle.
Paying to prevent something bad from happening is a form of insurance. For the average person, even the average business owner, the costs of paying bribes are so low in comparison to your salary that you simply get on with it. The costs of not paying are unknown but can wind up being heavy. Paying bribes is like paying for a home security system: the more people who do, the more likely that those who don’t will be targets. The more likely you are to be targeted, the more incentive you have to pay.
But nobody would pay unless public services weren’t so terrible to begin with. And public services are so terrible to begin with because public services have always been terrible, so nobody knows any better and nobody gets up in arms about it. Also, nobody pays taxes. Also, it’s impossible to fire anybody in the bureaucracy.
Then there is corruption on a national scale, the skimming from building projects, the misallocation of resources, and kleptocracy- state funds going into the pockets of those who manage them. All legal. In truth, the president has such constitution power that he is legally authorized to award contracts and spend a significant amount of money without any oversight. Technically, this isn’t corruption at all. But anyhow, better that officials be corrupt and competent than the reverse. And at the local level, is there really corruption if there are no rules for awarding contracts and the local deputies aren’t bothered that the town treasurer doesn’t keep records?
So if corruption isn’t the problem, what is?
The problem is that nobody really minds the goats roaming the airport parking lot enough to do something about it.
My Lebanese friend had a couple of friends visit from France, and for the occasion, he brought with him a roll of Euro notes. How big was the roll? Fat. For those of you wondering why he brought with him all this money, the fact is that it’s illegal to move more than $5,000 of money out of the country at any given time. But if you come into Senegal and declare your monetary bringings upon you’re arrival, why, it wouldn’t make sense that you would be allowed to go out with any less than you brought in. And if you could conveniently get your hands on a roll of euro notes, say, in the outside bathroom of the airport before going through the declaration section of customs, when you leave…
My friend did not have to bribe anyone to make the scheme work. Due to sheer laziness on the part of the authorities, you can leave the airport, come back, and then go through a customs declaration, which doesn’t matter anyways because the customs agents won’t bother to check the validity of the form.
The simple fact is that the capital controls are not in place due to corruption. They are a futile tool used to maintain fixed exchange rates, which is itself a futile policy that hasn’t been corrected in the 47 years since independence. Likewise, corruption didn’t do the airport in: forty years of mismanagement and poor planning did. So why do people blame corruption for Africa’s ills, instead of horrible policies and mismanagement?
Probably because Africa is corrupt, and corruption is “BAD”. Instead of thinking of corruption as a problem, for a change, let’s think of it as a solution.
Your building permit will take nine months just to be processed? Pay four hundred dollars and it’ll be done by the end of the week.
The grading system unfairly kicks students out of school? Nothing that can’t be settled with a twenty dollar payment to the proper administrator.
Don’t have insurance, a driver’s license, or proper vehicle registration? Vehicle very much unfit for passenger transport? Two dollars will get you out of a police checkpoint.
And so corruption flourishes. There are two types of corruption: paying to get something positive done and paying to prevent something bad from happening. The vast majority of the population sees neither of these forms. For them, corruption is essentially irrelevant, since they pay no taxes and will never demand any of the services facilitated through bribery.
Corruption exists because just about nobody wants to see corruption end. Paying to get something positive done is like paying an expedited fee to get a passport quickly; more cost, less hassle.
Paying to prevent something bad from happening is a form of insurance. For the average person, even the average business owner, the costs of paying bribes are so low in comparison to your salary that you simply get on with it. The costs of not paying are unknown but can wind up being heavy. Paying bribes is like paying for a home security system: the more people who do, the more likely that those who don’t will be targets. The more likely you are to be targeted, the more incentive you have to pay.
But nobody would pay unless public services weren’t so terrible to begin with. And public services are so terrible to begin with because public services have always been terrible, so nobody knows any better and nobody gets up in arms about it. Also, nobody pays taxes. Also, it’s impossible to fire anybody in the bureaucracy.
Then there is corruption on a national scale, the skimming from building projects, the misallocation of resources, and kleptocracy- state funds going into the pockets of those who manage them. All legal. In truth, the president has such constitution power that he is legally authorized to award contracts and spend a significant amount of money without any oversight. Technically, this isn’t corruption at all. But anyhow, better that officials be corrupt and competent than the reverse. And at the local level, is there really corruption if there are no rules for awarding contracts and the local deputies aren’t bothered that the town treasurer doesn’t keep records?
So if corruption isn’t the problem, what is?
The problem is that nobody really minds the goats roaming the airport parking lot enough to do something about it.
posted by Unknown at 11:41 AM
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