ABSTRACT
The minister’s eyes were like egg yolks, an after effect of some of the many illnesses, malaria especially, endemic in his country. There was also an irrefutable sadness in his eyes. He spoke in a slow and creaking voice, the voice of hope about to expire. “In 45 years I have never seen things so bad. We did not manage ourselves well after the British departed. But what we have now is something worse-the revenge of the poor, of the social failures, of the people least able to bring up children in a modern society.” Then he referred to the recent coup in the West African country Sierra Leone. “The boys who took power in Sierra Leone come from houses like this.” The minister jabbed his finger at a corrugated metal shack teeming with children. “In three months these boys confiscated all the official Mercedeses, Volvos and BMWs and wilfully wrecked them on the road.” The minister mentioned one of the coup’s leaders, Solomon Anthony Joseph Musa, who shot the people who had paid for his schooling, “in order to erase the humiliation and mitigate the power his middle class sponsors held over him.”…
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The cities of West Africa at night are some of the unsafest places in the world. Streets are unlit; the police often lack gasoline for their vehicles; armed burglars, carjackers and muggers proliferate. Direct flights between the United States and the Murtala Muhammed Airport, in neighboring Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, have been suspended by order of the US Secretary of Transportation because of ineffective security at the terminal and its environs. A State Department report cited the airport for
“extortion by law enforcement and immigration officials.” This is one of the few times the US government has embargoed a foreign airport for reasons that are linked purely to crime. In Abidjan, effectively the capital of the Cote d’Ivoire, or Ivory Coast, restaurants have stick and gun wielding guards who walk you the 15 feet or so between your car and the entrance, giving you an eerie taste of what American cities might be like in the future. An Italian ambassador was killed by gunfire when robbers invaded an Abidjan restaurant. The family of the Nigerian ambassador was tied up and robbed at gunpoint in the ambassador’s residence….
