This is the follow up to a story about the Environmental task force, and their methods. The problem they say is that street hawking brings crime and chaos, and besmirches the image of Abuja as a modern city worthy of being a federal capital.
The real situation is that illiterate people are giving up the country to come and sell services like phone recharge cards, car washes, shoe repair, finger and toenail clipping, and yes, even drugs and sex because there is a market for it and few alternatives in the 'formal economy'.
One analysis is that the gravitational pull to urban informal jobs is so strong the authorities are readily resorting to violence to make up for the failure of poverty reduction programmes in the countryside.
Another possible situation is that the 'godfathers' of the hawkers, the businessmen behind the street vendors, are getting in on both sides. There are mutterings among hawkers that the AEPB is nothing more than an official extortion racket. Where do these un-uniformed, unidentified operatives employed from? Hawkers who take more money, like suya sellers, pay them off and they are left alone. It is not so unlikely that someone somewhere is chopping big.

The environmental task force yesterday accused a musician beaten up by its agents of being a “hawking godfather”, and said its agents have the right to use force on people who get in the way of their operations.
The Abuja Environment Protection Board has been accused of using thugs in the execution of its duties by the National President of the GSM Product Marketers and Technician Association of Nigeria.
Hadiza Abdullahi, director of the AEPB, said their officers would be on the lookout for musician Age Beeka, 31, after he escaped a beating by the ‘task force’ last Thursday.
She said: “This is a wanted man. He broke the law when he tried to intervene in the officers doing their duty. How are you supposed to arrest someone? By just tapping them on the shoulder and saying come with me? If there is a struggle our officers are allowed to use force.”
City News reported yesterday Mr Beeka was punched repeatedly in the face and groin when he asked operatives of the AEPB why they were trying to arrest a night watchman and some hawkers in Port Harcourt Crescent. He says he did not realise they were AEPB until after they attacked him because they did not wear any uniforms or show him identification. He was put in the back of an unmarked van with federal plates where he says the beating continued. He escaped by jumping out of the van when it was driving. Witnesses in Port Harcourt Crescent have confirmed Mr Beeka was beaten.
Mrs Abdullahi said: “If you had dug a little further you will discover that this man is the sponsor of the boys selling the cards. Why would he intervene otherwise?”
Mr Beeka said: “What evidence do they have to say that? It’s ridiculous. I’m taking them to court and let them show the evidence they have to say that. How is it part of their legal duty to beat up people?”
Emmanuel Onwubiko of the Nigerian Human Rights Commission said: “This sounds as if it breaks constitutional rules on torture. If someone is resisting arrest, minimal force may be used, but there are recognised legal techniques for getting alleged suspects to cooperate. Punching someone in the groin is torture!”
Diran Onifade, special assistant for communications at the Federal Capital Territory said: “There is no evidence that he was beaten up. The scars in your picture are clearly from where he admitted himself he leaped from the moving van. He evaded arrest and has broken the law. It is very likely he did this because he is the hawkers’ godfather.”
Prince Fidelis Nnadi national president of the GSM Product Marketers and Technician Association of Nigeria told City News yesterday after the conclusion of the association’s general meeting in Abuja, that they have complained to the AEPB authorities about the situation but nothing has been done to stop it.
“We have been complaining about this same situation for over three years now but nothing has been done about it by the authority, we have organised series of workshops in which they were invited but never honoured the invitations” he said.
The AEPB denied using thugs and said their plainclothes officers only enforced the law.
The AEPB director, Mrs Abdullahi told City News hawkers are responsible for committing crimes like rape and robbery.
Mr Onifade said Mr Beeka got off lightly. He said: “If this were in America, this musician would have been dead!”

The pocket men

We were eating our breakfast when the law walked in. One man in a blue kaftan and hat shook my friend's hand. He ignored me. The other, a short muscular bald man in a dirty white t-shirt stared at me intently chewing his lip, but said nothing. Trouble.
The man in the hat said, in English: "We are immigration officers. We want to know who your friend is and what he is doing here, and to see his papers. We will leave you to your breakfast but we will wait outside."
He turned his lean face to me. It looked like a dark manila envelope that had been folded up and kept in a pocket, perhaps for many years. His thin body was lost in his voluminous kaftan, but bones stuck out here and there. It was a new and bright blue, the cloth was still shiny. "Do you have your papers?" he asked.
I was slightly stunned. I didn't know I needed to show my passport to immigration in order to leave Abuja. I'd left in something of a hurry and forgot my passport, along with my cerpac green card and journalist accreditation. In the year that I have been in Nigeria, I have never once been asked to show these documents, even when stopped by police looking for a bribe.
"No I don't" I said.
"Ah there will be a problem." He said, relieved. "We will wait outside." They turned and left.
We ate in silence for a moment, considering the situation. "Is it a problem?" I asked
“Don’t worry. Let’s just eat our breakfast,” my friend said scooping a forkful of liver and chips into his mouth. He was clearly fuming.
I looked at the broad shoulders of the man sitting at the table across form us. He’d sat down moments before the officers walked in –a security man listening in? The restaurant was dark, even though it was midday outside. The curtains were drawn and the weird blue light made everything look a bit queasy.
“How can they just come in and demand to see my papers, with no identification, or uniforms?” I asked. But we tried to talk about other things instead. I ate slowly, because through that door was all kinds of wahallah.
The twisting “logic” of the rent-seeking official has been one of the most confounding aspects to life here. A friend of mine told me when she was reporting the loss of her green card the policeman who took her statement told her: “But how do we know it existed in the first place? That’s what I’m thinking. How do we know this isn’t a way of trying to get one through the back door?” On the face of it, not an unreasonable question for a policeman to ask you might say, but how would they check? I’m sure if she looked around she would not have seen a file box with her immigration files in it. There was no way there was any communication between immigration and the police, and even if it was true, how would she get a replacement from the immigration, if she hadn’t been given one already?
“Anyway this form is going to cost you two thousand, instead of one,” the policeman told her with a shrug and a grin.
Back in the restaurant, another friend walked in: our Gombe correspondent. We told him what happened. “I will talk to them. I’ll take them to the governor’s adviser,” he said, and he disappeared. We finished our meal and followed them.
When we got to the media man’s house the officer was there. He’d clearly been given a severe talking to, because he came out swinging.
“If it were not for who you were I would have every right to harass you, take you to the office and hold you,” he said. My friend could hold his tongue no longer. A torrent of Hausa came out, stinging the man. “How can you say you have the right to harass anyone? Kai! By what you are saying you are insulting your superiors. If you have superiors is it not true to say they are in Abuja? Did they not check his papers when he came into the country? Are you saying they cannot do their job?” It seems twisty argument can work both ways.
He pleaded with us. “I do have superiors, and they saw him and sent me to find him. They ordered me to.”He also said things that made me realise he had no idea what "my papers" looked like, or what the rules about them were. "Whenever you leave Abuja you have to get a stamp on your green card giving you permission." he said.
So that was it. If I hadn’t been a reporter, with friends, I would have been held in some skanky cell for god knows how long, like a dog!

The Kleptocracy

Right now I'm reading a book called Guns, Germs and Steel, in which the remarkable scientist Jared Diamond attempts to explain why Eurasian states and cultures came to dominate the modern world.
His argument is that ecological factors, not cultural or political ones, conspired to prevent people in the Americas, Africa and Australasia from developing strong agricultural societies capable of supporting bureaucrats and soldiers, or develop technology, or become resistant to diseases caused by germs. In short, the reason why Pizarro, the Spanish conquistador, captured Atahuallpa, the Inca emperor, was because the Spaniard had control of guns, germs and steel.
So far so obvious, but in exploring the reasons why it was not Atahuallpa who conquered King Charles of Spain, Diamond explores very interesting territory.
One of the most interesting theories Diamond tackles is the formation of states. A state, he says, is formed when populations reach a critical size. States are by nature organised kleptocracies where a class of privileged elites steal from the rest to maintain power. Any group of people numbering above a hundred thousand inevitably develops into a kleptocracy, the egalitarian roots of human society -as it began in family 'bands'- simply can't effectively manage the numbers of people.
American economist Mancur Olson also touches on this subject. The development of government, Olson argues in Power and Prosperity, comes from the incentives offered to the powerful. A 'roving bandit' pillages and takes every bit of produce, leaving destruction in their wake. But a bandit who can be persuaded to become a 'stationary thief' now has an incentive to allow development in return for tribute to prevent him from becoming a rapacious marauder again.
According to both Diamond and Olson, development comes when the kleptocracy has to increase its redistribution in order to maintain a hold on power. As Diamond says: "The difference between George Washington and President Mobutu of Zaire is simply one of degree."
Mainstream development theory says to be "developed" is to have a functioning judiciary, a free press, and the rule of law, created by 'perfect' people, to counter the influence of corrupt elites. This is a fundamentally different approach from one that says "development" is an illusion created by a cunning band of the powerful, who concede in order to maintain a grip on tribute.
Many development practitioners say a free press is essential to economic development. The free press is a watchdog on corruption, the theory goes.
Picture the scene: A senior member of a key institution is holding a regular press briefing. Journalists from more than one paper present start asking awkward questions about something that has gone wrong. The official offers the journalists a healthy-sized bribe in an attempt to get them to drop the story. If the journalists take the bribe, it's a done deal, nothing really more to be said.
But even if, in this *fictional* example, I'm happy to tell you the journalists present refused the bribe and ran the story, our paper would in the circumstances not be able to expose the bribe-giver in an attempt to prevent any other official from doing the same. The press itself will resist making that positive change, and for very sound reason: If we were to go that far, the paper would open itself to an absurd amount of risk.
As an editor told me: "Its one thing to not take a bribe, but it's totally another to tell people about it. We cannot be sure that in the future those people who refused won't be bought off again, and deny the thing we exposed ever happened. Better just to leave it at that." The fear of being violently silenced, silences.
By weakening trust in other participants of the game, over time the kleptocracy wins. Even though in this entirely *fictional* example, the journalists refused the bribe and wrote the story, the system remains unchanged, and the press decidedly 'un free' as the prospect for future control remains.