Corruption

The Sky is Falling, Travel

Just cruising down the Ibadan – Lagos expressway at 120+ km/h when traffic from the other lane of the dual carriageway suddenly joins ours:

Welcome to Nigeria! This bizarre (but somehow functional) experience came to summarize my general feeling about Nigeria when I spent a few days working there last week. It’s something tragically comic, like, “How can this possibly be normal?”

I had intended to write about my experiences — watching Chinese tourists passing wads of US dollars to airport officials, airport security asking for “some Naira” from my pocket during frisking, the unavailability of any coffee except Nescafé, etc — but when I started thinking about it all I realized it was actually just tragic.

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Kenya

Last weekend I had my phone — an LG Nexus 4 — stolen on a matatu in town (a City Hoppa bus on the Ngong Road → Nairobi route). It must have happened as I was getting off at Kenyatta Ave / Koinange street, as I had it in my hands just before then, but had put it into my bag before alighting. I wanted to go tell Safaricom to block the IMEI so that the phone couldn’t be used on their network, and apparently they won’t do that unless you file a police report.

This is what happened when I went to the Central Police Station to report the theft.

TL;DR: it was an very unpleasant experience; somehow they manage to make you feel like a criminal for being the victim of a crime… (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

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Kenya

Today, while driving up Wayaki Way to work, I saw a matatu driver reach out his window and wedge a folded up 50 shilling note under his door handle; he was anticipating being stopped at the semi-regular police traffic stop near Mountain View (about 10 kilometers outside of Nairobi).

As I imagine it’s quite hard to picture, I took a few minutes to recreate the scenario in the Sarit Center parking lot…

Alan with a 50 shilling note
Alan with a 50 shilling note

50 Kenyan Shillings is only about 75 US cents, but if you imagine that the cops stop hundreds of people in a day… wow. And that’s only at that ONE check point, out of hundreds of other ones operating on any given day in Kenya.