Africa Confidential turns its focus this week to Ibrahim Bah, who was a key financial conduit between the RUF and Charles Taylor during the Liberian and Sierra Leonean wars [the articles are gated]. Despite being under a UN travel ban and asset freeze, Bah travels in and out of Sierra Leone frequently and conducts business unencumbered in Freetown.  In 2008 he had a gold and diamond trading company based out of an office very close to a police station in Freetown. He is also involved in a mercenary firm that has tried unsuccessfully to engage in recent conflicts in Cote d’Ivoire and Libya. Sierra Leonean officials turn a blind eye to all of this.

The highlight of the Bah articles, however, is the connection between Bah and an Italian businessman named Vittorio Narciso Ruello. Bah appears to have screwed over Ruello repeatedly, taking hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy diamonds but never delivering the diamonds.

In a statement to the police, Bah claimed he was not defrauding Ruello but suffering from the ups and downs of an uncertain business.

The best part, though, is that Ruello paid Bah to make him a Sierra Leonean honorary consul to Guinea Bissau (a la The Ambassador). This is even more outrageous than the Central African Republic attempt as you can’t even be a Sierra Leonean citizen unless you are of “Negro African descent” (for more on this see here and here). Anyways, Bah didn’t come through; it didn’t work. So Ruello went to the Sierra Leonean police to complain of being cheated!

This morning I’ve been Googling for sample survey questions that measure concepts that lots of academics are interested in. For example, I want some questions on my survey to measure social capital, and see no need to completely recreate the wheel. I found this World Bank document with ideas.  One sample question:

Which members of the community participate most in solving the issues facing the community? (then it asks for responses based on employment status, age etc.)

I’ve also been trying to incorporate questions from the World Bank Enterprise surveys for the purpose of comparability. For example, here’s one question I’m interested in from the Enterprise surveys:

To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement: Government officials’ interpretations of the laws and regulations affecting this establishment are consistent and predictable

Last month, however, I pre-tested a lot of questions like these with Nigerians, including specifically a version of this question about predictability. Uniformly, they did not work. Nigerians do not like to answer hypothetical and vague questions like these. “What laws and regulations?” every respondent asked. I am certain if I asked the social capital question respondents would say, “What issues are you talking about?”

Sometimes vague questions are too vague for anyone to provide an answer. But sometimes they are answerable. If one specified a level of government, the question about predictability is answerable. But, to generalize, Nigerians don’t talk like this. They are used to direct and specific questions.

As a result, questions in my survey about government predictability, for example, will be extremely specific. This will improve response validity, but will not allow me to compare responses to Enterprise surveys in Albania or Gabon. Sad.

A seemingly ordinary footnote, until one realizes that North is one of the paper’s authors.

Mancur Olson’s (1993) roving and stationary bandits and Douglass North’s (1981) revenue maximizing monarchs are at the center of the two most persuasive attempts to explain the interrelated behavior of economies and polities. With all due respect, we submit that modeling the state as a single actor is inherently flawed. Unless we understand the dynamics of relationships within the organization of the state, we can never understand the interrelationship of politics and economics.

One of the small pleasures of Lagos was the free trial subscription I accepted from MTN for daily health tips via SMS. They were always about honey. Until they were always about lemon. Some highlights:

Honey is referred to as “Yogavahi” since it has a quality of penetrating the deepest tissues of the body when it is used with other herbal preparations.

All honey is antibacterial, because the bees add an enzyme that makes hydrogen peroxide.

[etc. etc. etc.]

There are many health benefits of lemons, known for centuries. The 2 biggest are lemons strong antibacterial, antiviral n immune-boosting properties.

From the Lagos State Government Facebook page: