Malabo port

Last month a friend and I traveled by boat from Malabo, Equatorial Guinea to Tiko, Cameroon, to Calabar, Nigeria to Oron, Nigeria.  I thought boat travel would be the poor man’s way of travel, but this was not the case.  The trip cost in total about $150, plus lodging for a night in Cameroon.  As a result, the Nigerian and Cameroonian passengers chose this route perhaps in part to save a bit of money, but I think more because you can carry more goods on a boat than on a plane.

Fishermen off the coast of Cameroon

The 6-hour trip to Tiko was gorgeous.  Everyone wanted to be in this big air conditioned room, so we had the upper deck all to ourselves.

Immigration at Tiko was not fun.  The man who had the transit visas had gone home for the night.  An incredibly corrupt immigration officer kept us in her office for about 3 hours as she collected bribes from passengers whose documents were not in order.  She was waiting us out.  Finally we paid our first-ever bribe to be let into the city: $40.  Half of this went into her overstuffed wallet, and half went to bribe the soldiers to let us out without the transit visas.  It was a horrible experience.   We essentially reported her the next morning, and after we were already on the boat to Nigeria, got free Cameroonian transit visas.

The boat from Cameroon to Nigeria

The overnight ride to Calabar took 9 hours and was very comfortable.  As we walked off the boat’s ladder, a woman in plain clothes took our passports and told us to follow a man in plain clothes.  They turned out to be State Security Service officials, and we were professionally interrogated about our boat trip and travel for a bit.

We boarded our next boat to Oron.  While walking around the Oron market we were interrupted by an immigration officer, as Oron is also an international (albeit very small) port.  He went through out passports for about 45 minutes, trying to find something wrong with them.  Failing at that, he made us come to the Oron immigration office.  For another two hours we were interviewed by more immigration officials and another State Security Service officer.  We waited them out.  Finally, one of the immigration officials asked us for money to cover the photocopies they had made of our passports.  We refused, and were let go.

Overall: a fascinating experience, especially seeing how immigration works outside of the polished international airports in big West African cities.  But not an experience I wish to repeat.

Many types of private-order mechanisms arise in market economies. [...] A New York cable television company, Paragon Cable, has a novel strategy to get its customers to pay their overdue bills. It does not unhook the cable.  Instead, using what is supposedly a far more effective bill-collection measure, Paragon runs C-SPAN, with its political speeches, debates, and hearings, on all seventy-seven channels.

From “Private Order under Dysfunctional Public Order” by John McMillan and Christopher Woodruff.

My friend and I finally gave up.  Air Nigeria had no line, and listed a flight leaving at the same time.  We bought an Air Nigeria ticket.  Little did we know, there was a reason Air Nigeria had no line.  ”The airline is not reliable,” one person euphemistically told us later.  It turned out there was no such flight.  We waited 5 hours in the airport before getting on an afternoon flight.

While waiting, I got angrier and angrier.  On top of all of this, the 45 minute was $180, the norm for flights of this length in Nigeria.

I saw a suggestions box.  I wrote a letter venting my frustration with the line cutting.  As I approached the suggestions box I realized it was full of trash.  I dropped the letter in anyways.

This morning I woke up to a voicemail from the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria. They had received my complaint, and wanted to let me know they had formed a sub committee to address my complaint. They will keep me posted on any changes in policy.  A few hours later I received a follow up text.

I am [person's name] of d FAAN SERVICOM DEPT. Port Harcourt Airport. Nigeria. Yr complaint of 17th Jan 2012 on ARIK and AIR NIGERIA is receiving attention. I will give u d feedback. Our apologies.

Small victories.

A full explanation of the motion available here.

The UN Panel of Experts Report available here.

If held up, a driver who genuinely does not have any money knows that this will be interpreted as a refusal and aggravate an attacker further.  So while drivers tend to drive with as little money as possible, they avoid driving with none at all.

I often ask taxi drivers how long they have been working, just to make small talk.  Apparently this is a bad question.  Thieves ask this question to determine whether drivers are carrying a lot of money.

[There is a] distinct “dry season” bias.  Visits tended to occur when travel was easy, when the weather was more bearable and disease and hunger were less prevalent, or when the expert could get away from teaching commitments in the developed country, breaks that conveniently coincided with this dry season.

Johnny Dwyer on the Boston Globe retraction of the Taylor-CIA story:

Taylor’s relationship with U.S. officials was long and complex, but was he a spy?

In the thousands of pages of documents I’ve reviewed, hundreds of hours of interviews I’ve conducted in the U.S. and Liberia, nothing I’ve seen or heard suggests that.

Was he a “source”? Well, what does that mean?

Lost in this is the political geography of Monrovia. There are two centers of political power there: the Executive Mansion and the U.S. Embassy. They’re about a five minute drive from one another. The Defense Attache at the Embassy is an employee of DIA–the attache and their underlings are responsible for being connected and fluent with those in power in the country they’re posted to. In Taylor’s Liberia–which I’ll date to 1992, even though he was elected in 1997–the core political players were limited to a few dozen people, stretched out over a city considerably smaller than Brooklyn, who generally ate at that the same restaurants, frequented the same nightclubs and took their meetings at the same hotels. So did Charles Taylor, in the course of his 14-year political career, discuss information with the Defense Attache or another DIA employee that warranted inclusion in a cable? I know he did. Does that make him a source? Yes, I guess so. Does that mean he “worked” for the United States? Not in my book.

A sign in the domestic terminal at the Lagos Airport. “AIDS!!!…Now that we have your attention please DO NOT LEAVE LUGGAGE unattended…and don’t forget. PLAY SAFE.”

I was taking a shared taxi a few weeks ago in Malabo, and was sitting next to a police officer.  He offered some implicit marriage proposals, and at the end of the trip insisted on giving me his name and number, as written above.