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Corruption Exported |
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In August of this year, the Holland-based company Trafigura Beheer BV, which specializes in that dubious field of “commodities trading,†needed to dispose of some trash. The Probo Koala, the barge carrying the waste, attempted first to unload it in Amsterdam, but the company hired to dispose and treat the waste hiked its prices and Trafigura was unwilling to pay. Instead, it sent the Probo Koala down to the West African coast, where after several failed attempts at finding local firms to accept and dispose of the waste it found a taker in the Ivory Coast.
Two weeks later, residents of Abidjan, a city once considered exemplary among African capitals for its political stability and cleanliness, began to feel a little funny. They reported smelling noxious odors around the city, as well as headaches, nosebleeds, stomach aches, nausea, and difficulty breathing. Within weeks ten had died, sixty had been treated in hospitals, and nearly a hundred thousand reported symptoms.
The cause of sickness was quickly attributed to recently-arrived piles of toxic waste. Trafigura’s trash, it turned out, was a highly toxic mix of gasoline and caustic petrochemical slop. Disposal services had been finally bought from a local company called “Tommy†which, in the cloak of nightfall, spread the five hundred cubic meters of untreated waste among eleven sites in and around Abidjan.
Little wonder outsourcing treatment of this waste had proved so problematic for Trafigura.
Meanwhile, in the tiny sub-Saharan nation of Lesotho, the British “management, engineering, and development consultancy†Matt MacDonald has been accused of bribing Lesotho officials to obtain contracts in connection with the Lesotho Highlands water project, the world’s largest water transfer scheme. Worth billions of dollars, this scheme to build massive dams and infrastructure is intended to supply (i.e., sell) hydroelectric power to South Africa, and has already caused the displacement of around thirty thousand of Lesotho's residents, primarily subsistence farmers.
These stories, diligently reported in the business pages of international news agencies, reveal the thoroughly unsurprising trend of Western corporate misbehavior in Africa. Using Africa's cities as landfills and buying off the guardians of its natural resources are thinly cloaked metaphors for Europe's historical abuse and exploitation of its unlucky neighbor to the south. Trafigura, of course, denies any responsibility for what has happened in Abidjan, blaming instead the company it contracted to do the disposing. And it turns out Matt MacDonald works on behalf of the German-led consortium to which it belongs, Lahmeyer, which had itself already been found guilty of bribery in connection with the Lesotho Highlands project and banned from contracting on World Bank projects.
Ethics, it seems, are as foreign to these companies as their victims.
And yet, I remark on these stories specifically because each has a follow-up story of inspiring reaction on the part of their victims. The residents of Abidjan protested violently, causing much of the existing Ivorian administration to resign after their negligence, and even participation, in the dumping became known. These officials, as well as the Nigerian businessman they conveniently permitted to set up “Tommy†(created, it appears, solely to accept the waste) have been jailed. Also jailed are two European employees of Trafigura in the Ivory Coast, where journalists report they fear retributive mistreatment from their fellow inmates. The victims of the toxicity are in the process of suing Trafigura, and the waste has been relocated (appropriately) to France where it can be properly treated and incinerated.
And the Kingdom of Lesotho, in addition to convicting its own officials for accepting bribes, has taken the extremely rare measure of trying and convicting foreigners who bribe its officials.
Western governments love to point out official African corruption and graft when they are called upon to aid Africa’s poor. They even appear magnanimous when they organize and pledge “solutions†in spite of Africa’s corruption, like when Britain signed an international anti-bribery convention, and when the Netherlands ratified the Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal.
Yet these are cases of African countries and citizens genuinely attempting to establish legal transparency and justice, to the degree demanded by Europeans and Americans of their own governments. They are exemplary in Africa, but also, it must be said, in the West as well. The civil war-torn Ivory Coast and HIV-ridden Lesotho are not exactly countries with means. Their officials were no doubt guilty of corruption, but they are also in jail at the hands of their former employers. The same cannot be said of the European beneficiaries of this exploitation.
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