China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa by French Howard W

Author:French, Howard W. [French, Howard W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385351683
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-05-20T05:00:00+00:00

Joseph F. Kamara, the head of the country’s Anti-Corruption Commission, received me in his upper-floor suite in a tumbledown building on a ragged downtown side street. He sat erect behind a black desk, appearing serene, almost as if in meditation, when his secretary led me in. He was a large man, tall and heavily set, and he was dressed soberly in a dark, pinstriped suit, red-striped tie, and frameless glasses. Altogether, he dominated his small and uncluttered office, which showed little obvious sign of bustle or even busyness.

Outside of his building, I’d walked past a crowd of people milling on the broken sidewalk, waiting to get in to recount their tales of corruption. Many others, I knew, sent him anonymous tips. But the reality was that there were very few people to follow up on the complaints, and virtually no one of comparable competence to the commissioner to prosecute and make any charges stick. His first sentence certainly did nothing to disabuse me of this impression of being overwhelmed. “Sierra Leone has not had a good experience with natural resources,” he pronounced, mantralike.

Kamara was the second occupant of the commissioner’s chair, whose creation was one of the little victories of civil society that Rahall had pointed to. Kamara’s job was to try to bring the proceeds from the country’s sale of minerals into the public coffers for the first time and reduce the incidence of major fraud, bribery, and graft.

Kamara said he had increased the number of prosecutions fivefold in his two years in the job, but he would be the first to admit that his office was fighting a steep uphill battle against powerful, moneyed forces that operated in the shadows. These included old-line Lebanese barons, eager Chinese newcomers, big multinationals, as well as murky, out-of-left-field entrants like Frank Timis and his African Minerals company, whose interests in Sierra Leone he said had become so big that the country now risked something he called “state capture.”

“The economy used to be in the hands of the Lebanese, but what you are seeing is the emergence of new players. My challenge is to make sure that no deal is bigger than the law.”

From the vantage point of his modest office, it was hard to imagine how this man could possibly stay ahead of the forces of corruption arrayed all around him, and they certainly didn’t stop with foreigners. Friends of Kamara had told me about the scarcely concealed hostility toward his efforts shown by people in the president’s office and in the legislature. And it was easy to see why. Instruments of law were no match against an older kind of government magic, patronage networks and corruption.

He had investigated and convicted the minister of marine resources for trafficking offshore fishing permits, many of which went to the industrialized Chinese vessels that overfished the scarcely policed waters off West Africa’s Atlantic bulge. Under his predecessor, a minister of health had also been convicted in a major procurement fraud scheme. But these were

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