In pursuit of happiness

This is the best time of the month: when people have got money in their pockets. We set up ourselves by the side of the road and look forward to a profitable day. We like to work in threes: once we stop a car one of us talks to the driver, while another one stands in front, and the third stands behind. In that way the driver can’t make an escape if he thinks he’s caught.

There’s only one problem today. This is such a good route that there are three other road blocks within two kilometres. It doesn’t make any sense, because one group is taking the money that another group could get. But our Commanding Officer doesn’t listen to our complaints. He just says if you think your salary’s too small it is up to you to work out how to get some extra.

As I said, it’s a good route. That’s because there are so many cars and mini-buses. The mini-buses are the best for us: they often haven’t paid their insurance, or their lights don’t work. It amazes me how many fines they pay because their lights don’t work, but the drivers tell us that the owners are too busy to do anything about it.

But in some ways this is a bad route, because most of the drivers have very little money. A friend of mine has got a much better one: he managed to be assigned to the other end of town. They’ve mounted a wonderful operation there. Every month or so they set up road blocks to catch people who haven’t paid their insurance. Quite frankly I’m not surprised that people don’t pay it on time – how do you find $450 to pay in one go? It’s ridiculous. But it’s good for us. As I was saying, in their road blocks they catch Mercedes, Land Cruisers, Pajeros, Hummers – all sorts of fancy cars. Then, if the driver can’t pay, they clamp the wheels. He’ll find the money quick – you can be sure of that. So they pick up $50, $100 or even $200 if they are lucky. The best ones are the expatriates because they easily get scared.

The only problem is that sometimes the driver of someone with connections gets hit on, and we get a huge blasting from on top, but it’s still worth it. It happened to me not long ago – boy was I annoyed. I thought I had got someone: she had a broken mirror. That’s not a big deal, but she had a fancy car and a white guy sitting next to her, so I thought she’s good for $50, or at least $20 – that’s 20,000 francs. But then she turned out to know the Commander in Chief for the whole province and I got a blasting. How unfair is that? (See Two Policeman and a Princess).

So this is my plan. I’ve worked it out with my two mates. We’ll stick to the area we’ve got. We only get about 2000 francs a time for most of our fines – it’s nothing more than a friendly deal so that the drivers don’t loose too much, and we keep a steady income. Sometimes, especially if we are lucky enough to see an accident, we can get 20,000 francs, or even more, but that’s not very common.

We’ll keep half our takings in a special place: it’s investing in the future. When we’ve got enough we’ll go to our Commander and persuade him (if you know what I mean) to give us a road with lots of the posh cars.

Then we’ll be happy.

Witnessing Jehovah

We were driving down a busy road, minding our own business when CA-LUNK!!

Looking behind we saw a vast, brand new, Land Cruiser turning across the road. It was a LOOK AT ME car, with high level air intake so that it can drive through rivers, and huge bars in front so that it can push through the jungle. And it, in its haste to find a slot to turn around on a main road, across two lanes of traffic, it had hit our back end.

The driver had the decency to stop, and we jointly looked at the damage. Luckily it wasn’t much – he had knocked off a back reflector, housed in our rubber bumper. Many people would have brushed that off: we had retrieved the damaged part from the road and could probably glue it back again. But there was something about the car that told me that we should insist on getting recompense. After all, the spare, small as it is, would probably cost a fortune – about $200.

It was at that stage that I noticed, on the driver’s door, in discrete writing, the words Jehovah’s Witnesses. That clinched it.

My driver took the lead. With great eloquence he emphasised the great damage that we had suffered and the inconvenience and cost that we would suffer to get it repaired, and demanded to know what the driver was going to do about it. Did he, we asked, want us to report the matter to the police? If he was going to be obstructive we would have no choice. Oh no no, we will find a solution. After humming and hawing he went to get someone else whom, it seemed, he had just dropped for a meeting nearby. The new person insisted that they would pay for the damage. But how? Then things got a bit vague. He phoned the HQ, and after a long palaver said we should go to the reception and they would sort it out. Meanwhile the driver would continue with his work. Continue with his work? – what about me continuing with my work? We insisted that the HQ person should come to us, and stop playing around with us. He phoned again. No, it was impossible for anyone to come here – they didn’t have a vehicle. So we relented and agreed to go there. That was followed by more negotiation in which we insisted that the driver come with us. We knew they would never believe us if we just turned up without him.

So the convoy started and half an hour later, in a grim industrial area, we come across this very high wall, topped with razor wire and bougainvillea. We get inside the compound and are stunned at the beautiful landscaping, the obvious sense of order and cleanliness, as well as the grand scale of the place. The whole compound must be about 8 – 10 acres, with workshops, storage depots, classrooms, assembly rooms, offices and presumably dormitories. Walking around these beautiful grounds were lots of blessed, mainly young, people, basking in the knowledge of being saved. And everywhere we looked were rows of shiny news cars, just like the one which had hit us.

We park in front of the main reception area, and the culprit driver goes to find the man who deals with accidents. When he returns, and before he says any more to us, he reprimands my driver for parking forwards: here, he said, you have to reverse into your parking bay. So we did that, only to be told that the man we had to see was out, and they couldn’t say when he would be back. The injustice of the situation was so ridiculous that we started complaining loudly. After a while a group of observers clustered around. We had been told that all we had to do was present ourselves at the reception and now no one would see us?  Appalling. Especially when we had important business to do.

Eventually a grey-haired old man came out and invited us inside. He said everything would be sorted out. The offending driver was invited in first to give his report, and after about fifteen minutes we all went outside to inspect the damage. But then we were given the same message: there was no one available to see us. The responsible person was on business in town, and there was no one else. Then we get a lecture about good management, about how the Jehovah’s Witnesses were organised in independent lines of command, and how someone from the gardening division could tell someone from the garage division what to do, etc etc. Who, I asked, does the person we are waiting for report to?  Surely there’s someone above him who can help us? He, came the reply, reports only to God. Then someone started saying that we should follow the law. The law was that if you had an accident you had to report it to the police. And then the matter would be put in the hands of the insurance people. And so it went on, arguments becoming more and more bitter as their self-righteous attitude became more and more intolerable.

Then a little Frenchman (or more likely Canadian) turned up. He heard the story, made a phone call, and said “How would it be if we buy the spare part, and then call you when we’ve got it so that we can fit it for you? And, by the way,” he added, “I am very sorry for the accident and the inconvenience you have suffered.”

And that was that.

Is it worth it?

Being in the development business can be frustrating, even more so when, for all your good work, nothing actually changes.

Picture a naughty child, whose playroom is forever a jumble of toys. To the outsider the playroom looks like a dreadful mess, though to the child that doesn’t matter one bit. Parents regularly give lectures to the child, but, though he may tidy up now and again, nothing really changes.  Bring in Supernanny (those who’ve seen the TV show will know how she brings children to heel in a matter of days, and everyone lives happily thereafter), to give the child encouragement and clear guidance about what needs doing.

I hope the Congolese Government won’t be offended by the parallel, but that’s just what’s been happening with the Government finances. After years of chaos, Supernanny (The IMF, the World Bank, the EU, Britain and France) brings in a team of highly experienced experts. They set up new budget systems, new tax structures and new expenditure controls. There are full time advisers in The Bank of Congo, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Budget. The first such adviser, from the IMF, started nine years ago, so everyone’s had plenty of time to get used to the idea of financial reform and modern management methods. They can now proudly point to the fact that the annual budget is now properly presented and analysed.

But . . . that’s theory. What about reality? The 2012 budget, which was ready for submission to Parliament in October last year, was only adopted by Parliament in July 2012, thus giving spending departments, in the first seven months of the year, carte blanche to spend what they liked. Why the delay? The members of Parliament were too busy campaigning for the elections in October and November last year to bother about the budget. And this year, it took five months to form a new Government and just as long to get Parliamentary timetables back on track.

But even if there had been a budget would it have made a difference? The 2011 budget was passed in good time, so no one could claim that it didn’t exist. But what they could do was to use the procedure for emergencies under which expenditure may be made even though it is not budgeted. And in 2011 the country experienced so many so-called emergencies that 47.5% of the budget was spent using that excuse. And if you analyse which Ministries had to face the most emergencies it was, of course, the offices of the President and the Prime Minister. Emergencies such as having to induce people to vote for them, maybe?

The neat thing about the Congolese budget is that individual Ministries have their own sources of funds – taxation which they can levy directly from the public. These funds are supposed to go directly into the national treasury, but the Ministries concerned have no intention of allowing that. So the funds are kept off-budget, and used as a personal slush fund for patronage by the Minister, and salary supplements for him and his senior staff.

The situation has not been helped by the fact that, in an effort to reduce corruption and other offences, the government invented a truly Kafka-esque system for the approval of payments. The total number of actions required to pay a government bill was, until very recently, 120. You can imagine that there is every incentive to bypass that process, if you can use your own Ministry funds and just pay friends and family directly for services received. Even though this process has now been reduced to 20 steps, there’s still every incentive to ignore the system.

Anyway, that’s all going to end soon. A new report prepared by Supernanny has detailed all this malfeasance and described in detail the liberties which have been taken with the system. We have every confidence that its recommendations will be adopted and implemented with enthusiasm within the next six months. Every confidence??