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Simply getting a country in business at all can be a formidable task. Mauritania, for example, is practically a movable country, whose Moorish nomads wander after water in passportless circles through neighboring Mali and Algeria. Since every country must have a capital, Mauritania had to build one from scratch: Nouakchott (pop. 8,000), a clump of pastel cubes on a bleak stretch of sand dunes near the coast. In Laos, there are so few trained government elite—about 100 in all—that Cabinet making is essentially a game of musical chairs. Ethnic vivisection abounds nearly everywhere. The Somali peoples are split up among Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya and French Somaliland; the Bas-Congo tribe is found in three nations, the Sawaba tribe in four. The reverse can be true as well: Laos, Nigeria and the Sudan, among others, are continuously rent by warring tribes that are unnaturally confined inside the same country.
Once in business, a new nation must establish embassies around the globe and send a mission to the U.N.—tasks that frequently exhaust both their finances and talent. Occasionally a new nation admits that it just cannot afford the overhead; although it is a U.N. member, Gambia has no U.N. mission, told the Assembly it might not be able to afford the minimum annual U.N. club fee of $40,000. The Maldive Islands near Ceylon are so poor that the U.N. must forward their mail through the Maldivian Philatelic Agency, located in Manhattan down the street from Macy's. Rwanda President Gregoire Kayibanda's chief government handicap is even more serious: he has no telephone in his palace in Kigali. Periodically he sends a minister driving off to neighboring Uganda to find out what is happening in the world. Rwanda is, however, progressing; until recently, it had only a barter economy based on cows. National pride also engenders pretensions as well as problems. Impoverished Dahomey boasts a $6,000,000 Presidential residence that is larger than Buckingham Palace. Mauritania has a Directorate of Forests and Waters, though it has no forests and precious little water. Upper Volta refers to its single quarter-mile of dual highway as the Champs Elysées.
The Fabric of Corruption
Such strutting at government often goes hand in hand with virulent corruption and an Old Boy monopoly of government jobs. In many countries in both Africa and Asia, every job from minister down to doorman is considered a sinecure to be purchased. Corruption is so much a companion of nationhood in some countries that it has become an integral part of the fabric of government. When the army took over in Nigeria in January, they found that Finance Minister Okotie-Eboh had arbitrarily raised tariffs to protect his own private shoe factory, and for a price was willing to do the same for others. One Laotian general on a salary of $250 a month supported his family and 32 relatives in style—all in the same house—by letting opium smugglers use army trucks and planes to move the stuff. A record of sorts was set by Burma's first Minister of Commerce and Industry, whose industriousness at graft netted him $800,000 in government funds before independence was yet a year old.