Boko Haram and the Indelible West
18th May 2014
But perhaps a Libyan source was not necessary. When I was in Nigeria I was told that the police and army either rented out their arms by the night or sold them to armed robbers, that is to say to common criminals. Everything else was for sale too; ministers rented their offices to swindlers who pretended to be minister for a day so that they could extract sums from foreign businessmen as earnests for contracts that did not exist. At least half the medicines on sale in the country were fake. What was astonishing was not that things did not work well, but that they worked at all.