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As often as not, large amounts of foreign food, cash and equipment never reach their intended destinations. A "transportation operator" in Sierra Leone received more than $2,000 from the government to distribute 150 tons of rice; investigators later discovered that the only vehicle he owned was a Honda motorcycle. During the '70s, badly needed relief supplies for Chadian refugees were routed through Nigeria. But the shipments never made it because the wife of a high government official in Chad demanded huge bribes from the Nigerian drivers.
With hard currency in short supply, black markets are booming. In Marxist Mozambique, drivers of the People's Taxi Service will happily switch off their meters and cruise all day for payment in dollars. No wonder: the black market pays up to 1,000 Mozambican meticais to the dollar, compared with the official exchange rate of 42. "To Africa's sickness, pestilence and disease, add corruption," says Senegal's President Abdou Diouf. "It is endemic to this continent."
Bribes, known variously as dash, chai or bonsella—the traditional palm greasing for services rendered or anticipated—have become a way of life. They now take the form of a carton of razor blades, a case of Scotch or the latest in digital watches. Smugglers make a killing in African marketplaces. Recently police raided a privately owned store along Pugu Road in Dar es Salaam and found a cache of spare vehicle parts large enough to fill the cargo hold of a ship. Says former Tanzanian Police Chief Ken Flood: "Africa has always attracted con men and carpetbaggers. But they were almost always whites from Europe. Now the blacks themselves have learned the game."
African leaders regularly order crackdowns on profiteering and corruption. Declared President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania last year: "[Economic saboteurs] will have their ill-gotten property confiscated and will be given hoes to work on the land for a very long time." Several hundred suspects are now being held in Tanzanian prisons under the country's Preventive Detention Act. Mozambique's President Samora Machel has publicly berated and fired corrupt government officials, as has Zambia's Kaunda. In Zimbabwe, the four-year-old government of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe has ordered stiff new penalties for corruption, including fines of $5,000 and five years' imprisonment.
Still, widespread opportunities for fraud have raised doubts that such measures will have much beneficial effect. Notes the London-based weekly magazine West Africa: "It, is open season for any racketeer with the capital and contacts to acquire sole control of some consumer product." A cartoon in another publication depicts a soldier talking to a village woman. "There is no food," he explains, "because we have shot the black marketeers."
But perhaps the most disturbing trend in Africa's postcolonial experience has been the continuation of tribal conflicts that have bedeviled the best-intentioned efforts at nation building. Kenya's Moi, a member of the minority Kalenjin tribe, calls modern Africa's tribal strife "the cancer that threatens to eat out the very fabric of our nation." From the beginning of the postcolonial period,