When you arrive in Ghana a big sign with the words ‘Akwaba’ welcomes you. Right below it is another sign “Peadophiles and other sexual deviants are not welcome here.” There was a gentleman sitting behind me on the plane who was reading a help-yourself-type book with the title, “The Hardness Factor.” I did not have to read the subtitle to know what that was about. I don’t’ think he fits the category the Ghanaians are afraid of, at least not yet. The lady sitting next to me on the way back was reading a much tamer book that contained 105 prayers. Of course I don’t know what the prayers were for.
When you leave the country you are reminded every 10 meters that drug traffickers eventually get behind bars. Someone designed this campaign, hired an ad agency and now it is considered implemented. Will any of these campaigns make a difference, I wonder?
On my last night in Accra I saw another campaign at work as I was watching a local TV network: a compelling ad shows people trying to slip money into the hands of officials for work they are not supposed to be paid for. In the first part of the ad you see various officials happily pocketing the bills and providing the payer (briber) with whatever it is he wants. Interestingly, none of the bribers are women. Then, the movie is rewound and the same scenes played over again but this time each of the officials portrayed (women among them) shouts ‘NO’ with the sound missing but you can read their lips. They bravely and selflessly put the common good before self interest. It looks so simple. It is a strategy out of the behavior change school that believes that exhortations to “just say no!” actually work.
That it is not as simple I witnessed at Accra’s airport yesterday morning. In order to get checked in and cleared to leave Ghana, with all your stuff intact, you have to follow a very convoluted and circuitous process with many stops where officials go through the same documents, open and close (or not) your suitcase and rifle through your carry-on baggage. A gentleman in front of me, flying business class to some UN meeting in New York pressed a 5 Ghana Cedi bill (about 5 dollars, a considerable amount of money for ordinary people and low level officials) into the hands of the lady who was checking his hand luggage. This is the weak chain in the security link. I watched her lips and she did not say ‘No.’ Instead she quickly zipped up the bags and the UN delegate was cleared. They saw me watching. I saw no signs of shame, secrecy or anything that indicated they considered what they just did wrong. I wondered whether they had seen the ad and if they did, whether they considered it had anything to do with their own behavior.
It may be a common practice and hard to stamp out, but in my line of work, the places I travel to, I have never needed money to get through a barrier. This includes a checkpoint with drunken teenagers carrying Kalashnikovs in northern Rwanda a few years before the genocide, a Kenyan security agent who found cash on me and told me I was not supposed to export any Kenyan Shilling (nice try) and a Guinean customs agent who wanted money but instead got a pack of condoms which I had been given after touring a PSI project in Kankan. May be the latter does count as a bribe but it has a nice side effect from a public health point of view.
I was thinking about the ad that urged me to contact an official whenever I witnessed bribing. I tried to imagine actually doing that right there in the airport and realized that the exhortation to ordinary citizens to act on (rather than only denounce) corruption is a nice idea but quite naive. I looked at officials in the area and wondered who I would go to. Who would be the righteous one who would take my complaint serious? Who would thank me because I had helped him (or her) stamp out the practice? More likely, I suspected, would be a polite nod from the official who would then turn around and make the rest of my departure miserable or encourage other to do so.
Corruption is so tightly woven into the fabric of life that I don’t think you can tackle it through exhortations on TV. And so I justified not sticking my nose into the UN delegate’s business. My Quaker consciousness rebelled a bit against this decision but my Dutch sense of realism and practicality won out in the end.
I am still not sure I did the right thing but I did get upgraded again to business class. Reward for what?
Sylvia's Journal 
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