Crtd 05-01-01Lastedit 16-01-20

Legal

What is "legal"?

Legal is how I imported my personal effects (see: Bringing in your stuff). That story points out that "legal" takes a lot of time and effort in Africa. Illegal is quick and efficient, though you pay more. Society is organized such as to stimulate you to go illegal (corruption).
There is another way to stay legal: you deal with an "agent". You pay the agent a lot of money and you do not ask him how he spends it. Clearly, the agent takes all the necessary illegal actions, but as long as you do not ask any questions, you are not responsible, hence you are perfectly "legal". The western tourists are usually in such a position: they pay amounts of money that are hundreds, often thousands of times the African price for services. They pay this to an "agent". To the western tourist, the amount of spending is normal for a holiday. The agent does what he needs to do and everybody is very happy.  Another place where you find a lot of "agents" is at borders where goods and people cross. Those "clearing agents" know their way around. Africans use them a lot. A "good" clearing agent (that is: one who knows how to operate illegally) can save an international trader a lot of money.
But one can go "illegal" in different levels. One can bribe officials, directly or indirectly, to get the required official papers. Or one can acquire papers that only appear to be legal. And since in Africa the paper-tradition and its associated corruption is a recent phenomenon, copied from the western colonialists, the difference between the two is not yet very strict.

In the days before the Iraq war of 2003, United States intelligence produced a document proving that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had made an attempt to buy raw uranium in the form of yellow cake from Niger. The document was immediately generally dismissed as an obvious forgery: it was reported to bear a childish signature and a wrong date. Of course, it could have been a forgery in the western sense. African archives are not free of them. But many a genuine document bears a childish signature and a wrong date. Moreover, the African criteria for what is genuine are different from the western ones, genuine roughly being understood as: made by the powerful people in charge, false as: not endorsed by the powerful people in charge (where the question whether they previously signed it is deemed largely irrelevant and impolite, even dangerous to ask).

What is the difference between bribing the officials who managed to settle themselves somewhere in the procedure to some kind of permit, or just bribing the office clerk who has the keys of the case containing the permit forms and stamps that you need? What is the difference, for instance, between bribing yourself towards the status of Ugandan national through the officials that the procedure requires you to deal with it, or simply contact the worker printing, in the basement of the building, Ugandan passports to have one made directly?
In the African context, everyone who sees an opportunity to block someone else, and require a fee for passage, will do it. Even roads are destroyed by villagers to help the cars and trucks through the mud for a reasonable fee.
The town council of Sirari, a Tanzanian town bordering Kenya at a road used between Kisumu and Musoma/Mwanza, raises, quite independently of the government border authorities, an "entry fee for Tanzania". After all, a good iron fence was made by the government border authorities, so why not build an additional little office?
Of course, you are not let through if you refuse to pay, of course, you are "illegal" if you force your way through. But one week after I told them I would send the receipt for my "entry fee for Tanzania" to their government, the little office was closed. They got wet feet. I succeeded to render illegal those who thought could take the power to decide whether I was legal....so, what in the very end, is "legal"?
Most natural and normal things to do are illegal without a fair amount of permits that at first sight seem hard to get. But once you take some money and spend a fair amount of time to sit with the people in charge, you will find them quite reasonable and sympathetic, and take one advice...never loose your temper, that raises the price they will charge you.

Development aid, with its associated boosting of bureaucracy and corruption is of course the best way to keep Africa in the worst kind poverty. Production, trade and economic growth are the real means to get out of it . As for trade: why do African countries levy import and export tariffs?  And, what is worse: why do they so openly leave unpunished the outright misuse of those tariffs by their customs officers for private enrichment (see Bringing in your stuff)?  This causes uncertainty under traders and investors hence blocks trade and growth. Another way to promote wealth is Westerners buying the country's services as ecotourists. But that is disrupting wildlife, turning it into an zoo-industry. Another way to wealth is to welcome westerners who just wish to enjoy the beautiful climate and the clean environment. By making them free to choose where to spend their money and on what, the local economy directs itself to the service quality and quantity demanded. Westerner just wishing to live and spend their hard currency are, however, legally banned by the African governments (see Immigration). Forms, barriers, permit regulations etc. block the westerners' path everywhere. Big and petty official thieves everywhere try to force some little money out of the westerners' pockets without having to supply any good service for it in return, thus laming their own local economy. Morality continues to go down by the bad example of the behavior of UPDF, the Ugandan government's army, in Congo, where nothing is done to help and oblige the local population and instead what is not effectively hidden, is stolen, taken to Uganda for private use or to sell abroad. Though the idea of economic development has been put forward brilliantly by President Museveni in theory and practice, a critical mass of government elite, as well as the greedily awaiting opposition now seems to have decided that the traditional habit, well known in Africa and in Europe before the industrial revolution, of looting and stealing from rival tribes and from the powerless remains an easier way of life. If those trends are not reversed, both "legal" and "illegal" will again be on the run for scores of contesting usurpers, dividing among themselves not the riches, but the poverty of economically lamed masses.

More: corruption Illegal

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