Integrity Theatre

It began with the best intentions - a free lunch. We would bring our HIV-patients in to the clinic to give them food and talk about vaccines and the importance of vaccine research. It would be cheap, uncomplicated, and executed within 48 hours. All we had to do was get the go-ahead from the council.

How's About A British Jig and Reel

Three days later, the head of the health council chokes back the words “per diem”, settling instead on  “transport costs" to be paid for all 70 attendees, a list comprised of community leaders, imams and NGO representatives, most of whom have cars or motorcycles and don’t have to pay for transport. We cajole and we push, but they are immovable. We dig our heels in everywhere we can, and are bowled over by  accusations of cultural chauvinism. This is the council president, a public servant and sworn advocate of health for all, beaming at me as he puts the money into his friends’ pockets. We left meeting after meeting frustrated, outmaneuvered and impotent, but at least it's not just us. Another organization works with some of the same people, and after the organization provided food food a special occasion, their doctors expected to be fed at each meeting. The costs add up, and providing stew at the monthly meetings would preclude the enrolment of an additional 100 children in a life-saving program. “But you mustn’t make such comparisons” they said. But you must. There is only so much money, either it pays for one thing or it pays for another.

Our costs continued to climb as we changed to a “more respectable venue”, added imams and leaders from other sectors of the city, and improved the quality of the paper invitations. This was our infuriating Big Dig, and as we reached our allotted budget, we had to cut out our target audience, the HIV patients. A simple lunch for our vulnerable patients became a complicated conference for the village leaders, without a single one of our patients in attendance. In order to acquire community legitimacy, we had to throw ourselves into the diplomatic spin cycle, and it sucked. Worse, despite our insistence that we are not setting a precedent to follow, we are. Any conference we hold must now include croissants and per diems, or it will fail before it starts.

Corruption wears many hats, some more benign than others, each inscribed in a social, economic and historical context. It's neither ubiquitously nor exclusively African. Transparency International recently released their Corruption Perceptions Index, and found that while many African countries still struggle, Botswana is ranked 33^rd alongside Portugal, while Mauritius is tied with South Korea. Eight African countries are less corrupt than Italy, and Mali (not one of those eight) is on par with Argentina. If strong,  honest institutions were sufficient to make a wealthy country, Ghana and Botswana would on par with the recent class of entrants into European Union, not beggar-nations asking for alms and debt forgiveness. 

Donors have a long history paying lip service to good governance, and a much-touted recent trend towards transparency is debatable. During the cold war, good governance was irrelevant and even counter-productive to the interests of donor countries, who were playing states against each other to establish and hold spheres of influence through no-strings-attached military aid, used as often as not to quash the popular will. Foreign aid happily bankrolled Mobutu, Amin, Zenawi and continues to fortify jagoffs like Paul Biya.

           
 Working For The Clampdown

There are some indications that this is changing, at least in countries that don’t have oil or aren’t strategically important in the war on terror. Governments tried, if feebly, to put pressure on Kenya after the 2007-2008 election debacle, in which both sides tried to steal the election. When the fallout became church-burningly violent, the expedient compromise was to double the number of cabinet seats and allow  both sides to steal equally. When gains accrue to politicians and losses are paid by citizens, the enforcers of ethics are stuck between a principled stand and the pragmatics of keeping people alive. USAID and other aid organization mention “good governance” and “civil society” in their grant outlines, but their primary stated roles are to enrich and empower, and you have to do the best you can with what you have. International organizations such as the Global Fund seem to have either more leverage or more drive, and have recently forced governments to prosecute embezzlers. Just a few months ago, they suspended their activity in Mali because of widespread grift that allowed millions of dollars to be pocketed by well-positioned officials and check-forgers. Officials are quick to hit back with the number of children that may die if left untreated.

     

Corruption can be broadly broken up into two types, though they are not always neatly separable. They are the skim, whereby the privileged parties take a little off the top in exchange for their voice of support, and the scam, in which the holders of power take the money and fail to furnish the service. We were forced to contend with the skim, an inefficient and frustrating custom that requires us to monetarily acknowledge the goodwill of each attendee. They are not crooks, in fact the conference revealed that many are in fact very sympathetic, wise people who simply do not share my opinion on the conflict between the provision of services to the poor and the cost of doing business.

 The conference, for all its inflated costs, turned out to be a great success. We explained our HPV and HIV programs to sixty of the most influential people in Sikoro, and nobody fell asleep. Some people even turned their cell phones off. In the Q&A period, we had imams come to us with earnest questions about vaccines and whether they affect fertility (No) and how many children a woman can have after being vaccinated for HPV (see above). One of the many opinions contributed with what I thought was excessive bellowing and accusatory finger-pointing was actually a man who didn’t believe in AIDS until this conference - he was expressing his conversion. They discussed amongst themselves, and decided that in matters of sexually-transmitted disease such as HPV and HIV, a current or future vaccine must not replace concerted societal investment in children to encourage safe and intelligent behaviour. The white-bearded village chief rose at the end of the conference and closed with a soft-spoken benediction: “I am not a learned man, I am not knowledgeable enough in science to know what is good or bad about this. We must do everything we can to keep our children safe, and we trust you, GAIA, to only bring the vaccine if it is good for our people.” The level of goodwill was astounding. People voiced their uncertainties  because they wanted answers, not because they wanted to spread cockamamie theories or because they had an axe to grind. Having followed the rhetoric building up to recent elections, I’m unaccustomed to the sound of the soft pause that follows an earnest question. If you’ve ever been in a sauna in January and run outside for the exhilaration of that split-second kiss of sweat, skin, steam and frost as you plunge into a snowdrift, then huddle back in the piney warmth of the sauna (if you haven’t, do it), that's a bit like what this felt like. 

Still, 500 dollars is a lot to put 60 people under a tarp for the morning, even a morning of productive discourse. Of course it would have been better if the same results could have been obtained without shelling out three hundred dollars for attendance fees. We could put more people on treatment, and buy more malarial medications. But this is the cost of high-level awareness campaigns, and if it works, it works. We have to pick our battles, and we may have to pay our allies as well. 

King Solomon, He Never Lived Round Here

On the other side of the fence, there is the scam, whereby money is pocketed and diverted to the Swiss banks and private palaces of those least in need. This is generally practiced on a much larger scale than the skim, but that need not be so. The critical difference between the skim and the scam, is that in  the latter, the service is not rendered. Rather than the grift serving the service, the service is only ornamental, only useful insofar as it allows more theft. This is the domain of the worst of the kleptocrats, the Mobutus and Mugabes, demonstrated perhaps most starkly by the Central African Republic’s strongman Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who spent 25% of his nation’s annual revenue on his own Napoleoonic coronation simply to prove that Black Africa, like France, can produce emperors. This is the corruption that keeps highways and ports from being built, pharmacies from being stocked, and school bookshelves empty.

A few evenings ago I caught up with Adrienne, a student on exchange in Bamako who happens to be from Providence. In between commiserating about wintry mix and extolling the virtues of Nice Slice, we discussed her recent travels around the country: she told stories of the majesty of Djenne, the rocky beauty of Dogon country and the barely-passable roads in between, all resigned to the same conclusion that the Malian government scarcely operates outside Bamako, and has little connection to its people. While the official language is French, it is the language of the educated – the rest of the country sings in Bambara. The absence of infrastructure, the unwillingness to furnish government services in a language accessible to the majority of the population, and the cars and clothes bought by the elites to differentiate themselves from the masses are all poignant expressions of the notion that Mali is a country of saints ruled by shitheads. The state apparatus seems to serve, more than anything, as an concentrator of money and aggregator of shitheads.

It's tempting to lionize the poor just because they are poor, to attribute to them some sort of quaint innocence or the moral fiber of the last unbribed souls. Any thinking person knows that's no more accurate than its opposite argument, the Malthusian drek that would have you think that the poor are morally bankrupt, and do nothing but breed and waste resources. Yet I traipse almost nightly through  the kind of conditions that breed crimes of desperation, and I have seldom felt safer. The necessary caveat is that as a man, I’m not subjected to the harassment that foreign women deal with, but even so, I’ve hardly heard of violent crime or property crime here.  In Nairobi a few years ago, I was caught out after dark, and people on the street were visibly distraught over the risks I was taking by walking a few blocks. One approached me and said what they were all thinking: “Are you out of your mind? Get in the next cab you see. In the meantime, pick up the biggest rock you can accurately throw”. That was Nairobi. This is Bamako, where shopkeepers sleep at the register, knowing their goods are safe.

Daddy Was a Bankrobber But He Never Hurt Nobody

As Adrienne and I shared a cab home, I pointed out a symbol of national pride: A large red maple leaf painted across the gate to the Canadian Embassy. I always get a little . Directly in front of the Embassy was a police checkpoint. This is not unusual, if you’re pulled over after 11 pm curfew,  you just show your passport, and on you go. “The one time I brought my real passport,” laughs Adrienne as she shows it to the cop. I only have my photocopy, which is usually ok. As a backup I also have my driver’s license, just in case. I hand him the photocopy, and he screws his face up. He doesn’t like it. It’s not notarized. The license gets a little more play, and is taken to the supervising sergeant, who comes to the car to flatly dismiss its validity. “I couldn’t take my Malian license and use it as an identity card in Canada, could I? Get out of the car”.

                    He was a tall, bald man in his late twenties, with eyeballs and biceps both bulging, hands gesticulating wildly before expertly stopping mere millimeters from my face. We meandered through about fifteen minutes of fruitless argument; I insisted that all my papers were in order, and he announced that they weren’t, waving his walkie-talkie in my face  and interrupting me with ever-decreasing patience and ever increasing volume. He made every bug-eyed effort to intimidate me, and it was starting to work. At the next clearing of silence, I said something to the effect of “sorry for the misunderstanding, I’ll go clear this up on Monday first thing in the morning, and I appreciate you letting me go.” He said something to the effect of “fuck that shit.” He pointed to his right. “Monte”. This literally means “climb” but in the context of a vehicle, means “get in”. The vehicle in question was a shoddy black pickup, the tailgate stenciled with the word“Police”. Welded onto the flatbed was a thin, crookedly-wrought iron bench. He continued, “sit there. Tu va passer la nuit avec nous”. You’re spending the night in a cell.

Ahem, no. I have yet to go to prison and I don’t want to start now, in this place, especially without a badass story behind me to provide the necessary prison cred.

Also incarcerated for inadequately stamped paperwork

I Needed Money 'Cause I Had None

                  The sergeant and I continued our tête-a-tête for another fifteen minutes, and he became increasingly bellicose. Very few Malians have qualms about vocal volume, and he was not one of the few. He actually seemed to enjoy yelling in 80% French, 10% Bambara and 10% sputum, and as a result I understood less and less. There is nothing so frustrating to an asshole cop as a stern lecture bouncing off the bewildered, vacant face of its target and echoing off into eternity. The gist was clear though -  this was a classic shakedown. They’re the police, and it’s 3am on the side of the road, so they’re very much in charge. They’ll do this to anybody, holding you on a trumped-up non-offence until you buy your release, but for toubabu, who are expected to be holding cash, the price can be outrageous. I might have been willing to buy my freedom, but it was one of my last days here, and the only money I had left was the dollar in my pocket that had been earmarked for the cab driver. So I argued. The usual stuff, like, “No, I’m not getting on that deathtrap”, “I did nothing wrong”, and “My identity is fairly easily obtained and confirmed as legitimate by these two documents here, which I have repeatedly presented to you. My embassy is right behind you and can verify this.”  His response: “Monte, or I will make you monte par force”, he spewed. As much as I didn’t want to monte¸I really didn’t want to be monted par force.

By this point, Adrienne was out of the cab, arguing on my behalf in much better French and maybe even some Bambara. Unfazed, the sergeant took to yelling at her and threatening her with jail as well. So that move didn’t work. He motioned to his deputy, and as he reached out his arm to grab me, I took a wee risk. I counted on this shakedown to be a non-violent one, essentially a very inconvenient bluff. So I called it. As he put his arm on mine, I slipped his grip and stepped back, relieved that his billy club stayed home. A crack in the armor, a realization that they’re not willing kick my ass in public. I made my way towards the embassy, again relieved that the deputy wasn’t directly grabbing me but trying simply to head me off. I got around him and, frantically, told the Embassy guards I had to get in. Je suis un citoyen Canadien." “Umm, there’s nobody here. We’re the night guards.” They were wearing the same brown uniforms that a lot of the private guards stationed in front of houses and office buildings wear. “This is an emergency, I’m being harassed by the police”. “We can’t do anything, and nobody’s here except the receptionist, another Malian” “Huh? The recep- nevermind. So I can’t come in? This is bad,” I observed, before sagely adding, “Fuck”.

As a second guard approached, and the first became a little more decisive and hands-on, I was out of options. Herded by the guards, I made my way to front of the truck, away from the flatbed. The two men already sitting on the bench looked exasperated, maybe just annoyed that they had been caught and were going to a holding cell, maybe pissed that I was delaying their transit and keeping them on uncomfortable benches. Totally out of ideas, I stalled some more. Now offering money I didn’t have, now zig-zagging away from this tightening net of annoyed cops, now deliberately fudging the grammar in my bribe offer so that it would be appealing but unintelligible, anything to buy enough time to think of something better than a cell, which I imagine is at least ankle-deep in shit and piss, and is by design an excellent place to get tuberculosis, cholera and a hepatitis or two. As I stammered at the deputies, I caught a glimpse of the sergeant -  he had been approached by one of the brown-uniformed guards from the Embassy. I went back to arguing with the subordinates, and almost didn’t notice that they had suddenly backed off. The sergeant came over and spoke softly and vacantly, like a professional athlete forced to account for past indiscretions. I hardly caught a fraction of it.  “I’m young, like you,” he said. He was letting me go.

And After All This, Won't You Give Me A Smile?

Somebody at the Embassy saved my ass in such a profound and literal way that I've decided to retire the phrase from my vocabulary. Had this checkpoint been anywhere else but that fifty-foot stretch outside the embassy, I would have been screwed. Then again, had this been any other checkpoint,  a license and photocopy of my passport would have sufficed and we’d have driven on. It is the arbitrariness of governance, as much as bad governance, that drives distrust and disdain of the state and its employees. Without an embassy behind them, the two men on the truck presumably spent the night in a cell. The sergeant will go on collecting bribes and splitting them among his deputies, at the expense of justice and of the well-being of his compatriots. 


I was complicit in paying out bribes this week, and I’m not proud. I helped establish our acceptance of a practice that slows down and gums up the machinery, and as a result it will cost more to pull off the next information session. We have reached the opinion leaders, and changed the minds of important people, and hopefully that makes it worthwhile, hopefully we can justify our complicity in excluding the HIV-positive patients with the fact that vaccine trials are now welcome in Sikoro. Maybe the optimism of the day will reach them. And the Health council president is right, we don’t understand the culture. Maybe the per diems really need to be paid. On the other hand, I managed to withstand one bribe, even if it was as much a result of my lack of means as the content of my character. Still I take great pleasure in the fact that I didn’t have to pay that expectorating anus of a police officer to abide by the law he swears to uphold. I got home, took a rare well-deserved 4am shot, and went to bed and slept. Not particularly restfully, but much better than I might have slept.