cadillacs and patty melts and monte carlos

corruption:
we drove around with franco one night in the old peugeot and there were police checkpoints. they just looked in the car and waved us on. seemed harmless enough. then we went out later with aroon in the mercedes E-class daddy moto and we get to the checkpoint and the cop puts up a grin and rubs his fingers together like so and says "money money!" aroon gave the first one 50 naira and he said come on so he upped it to 200. (about $1.25) the sad thing is he gave the guy that watched our car while we were in the club 20 naira. after passing through seven checkpoints it became clear that not everyone could be bribed. there are some people that drive carts down the sides of the roads wit plastic jugs full of kerosene or gasoline, plastic bottles full of kindling for wood stoves. mister tanny told us that obusanjo put about 720 million USD into getting the countries oil refineries into shape so they wouldn't have to import petrol, but no one knows where the money went. he said about one third of the oil extracted is sold by the european and american companies-shell, chevron, total-the other two thirds is given to the nigerian government. no one can say where it goes. there is an oil mafia that controls exports, bribing government officials so that a tanker may be sold to italian and russian mafias, to haliburton. a young coast guard officer got himself into trouble one time because he stopped a tanker that was leaving the port without identifying itself, as he was ordered to do, but this tanker had a deal with the navy that there would be a window in time where no one would patrol. the officer was summoned to abuja for some reason, and the tanker took off then. then he was reprimanded for getting away. all of the officers under him were given pitifully small sums ($150 - $500) to follow the oil ministry line and discredit the officer. mister tanny said that every major business that wants to set up has to make regular bribes to the electrical company, the telephone company, the police, etc. to see that they are allowed to operate. it is not possible that any multinational here is clean, he says, because it is impossible to operate without being corrupt. Jerry Rawlins, past president of ghana, cleaned up politics in the counrtry by having 120 or so corrupt officials murdered and replacing them. he stopped allowing ghanaens to leave the country and forced people to work on farms. he personally went to some farms and started digging to motivate people to do it. there were many refugees from ghana in nigeria during his time, who feared they would be murdered. rawlins stole a nice chunk of money on his way out. ghana's government is now considered one of the cleaner ones in africa, with public services and infrastructure than can be relied upon. most will admit that this would not have been possible without rawlins' oppression. mister tanny said that he would rather have one rawlins in nigerian politics than a million obasanjo's. but to do something like that in nigeria would require killing about 6000 people at least, a genocide. one of obasanjo's early ideas was to stop nigeria's rampant importation in order to encourage local industry. he later admitted that there was only so much he could do to beg customs to stop smuggling.

La cosidad es ese desagradable sentimiento de que alli donde termina nuestra presuncion empieza nuestro castigo...Oliveira es patologicamente sensible a la imposicion de lo que lo rodea, del mundo en que se vive, de lo que le ha tocado en suerte...-Rayuela

"cosidad is that disagreeable sentiment that where our presumption ends so begins our punishemnt...Oliveira is pathologically sensible to the imposition of all that draws him in, of the world that he lives in, of all the ways luck has touched him..."