The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World's Poorest People Are Educating Themselves by James Tooley

Author:James Tooley
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-fiction
ISBN: 9781933995922
Publisher: Cato Institute
Published: 2009-04-24T10:00:00+00:00

8. An Inspector Calls

Flashing Policemen

The winding dirt road from Bortianor, the fishing village home of Supreme Academy in Ga, Ghana, meets the main Accra-Cape Coast highway at what locals call the “roadblock.” It’s where the police used to stop all the traffic plying this route, where massive jams built up throughout each day. It’s no longer used; the barrier lies vandalized by the roadside. Now there are mobile police roadblocks, randomly set up anywhere along the route. Traveling back from Bortianor to Accra one day in a beaten-up old taxi, with huge cracks in its windshield, no seat belts, no functioning speedometer, and various other transgressions of the road-safety laws, we encountered one of these mobile roadblocks. As we neared the policeman who was waving us to a halt, my driver took out his license and documents and slipped a 10,000-cedi note (about $1.10) into the back pages. As we stopped, he handed his documents to the policeman, who perfunctorily pocketed the gift, and we were soon on our way. It’s called “flashing.” “Why don’t you flash me some small money?” is a common refrain from officials everywhere in Ghana.

It’s the same in Nigeria, traveling on the Lagos to Ibadan highway, where hulks of burnt-out trucks and cars lie by the road or are strewn across the median strip at disturbingly frequent intervals. The police wave you down—policemen who seem much more menacing than those in Ghana. Perhaps it has something to do with the Russian submachine guns they sport nonchalantly over their shoulders or the rounds of ammunition wrapped across their chests. Whenever I’ve been stopped in this way, the procedure was the same: they ask to see my passport, take it to their little bivouac on the other side of the road, make me walk all the way to meet their boss, and make me wait and wait, exchanging pleasantries about soccer (the captain of the Nigerian national team plays in the English Premier League, and they are always keen to explore my knowledge of this), keeping me waiting; perhaps my driver sorts out their “gratification.”

And it’s in India too. Rushing to take me to a dentist for emergency treatment in Hyderabad (fillings fall out in the most awkward of places), my car slipped through traffic lights while the lights were red. This happens a lot. Unfortunately this time, a motorcycle policeman was behind us and waved us down. My driver sighed and slowly got out, slipping a 500-rupee (about $12) note into his driver’s license.

This kind of low-level corruption among government officials is all-pervasive in the countries where I was traveling. How could the development experts write about regulation of private schools without considering this reality? Was I missing something, or were they?

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.