Comment by vezycash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vezycash | Hacker News Reader

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Before anyone judges Bill and Mark, you need to understand something about African "courts."

This bizarre story happened in a fairly developed town called Ikorodu in Lagos, Nigeria a few years ago.

A major busy road was filled with deep, large potholes. Every year, the local government would award contracts to fix the road but nothing would get done.

The owner of a gas station decided to fix the road with his own money. He bought the materials needed for the repair and stashed them by the road.

However, before he could start, he received a notice to stop work along with a court summon. The court ruled that he had no right to repair the road. And that he (could) should give the money to the local government so that they would undertake the repair.

Lest you think this was a black swan, the same scenario happened later in the industrial district of the area.

The road (a federal road) was awful. Residents insulted the companies (PZ, UAC, Dangote...) for making money but not fixing the road. The companies therefore banded together to fix the road but the exact same nonsense happened.

In conclusion, take this news with a bag of salt.

(edited: fixed typos, changed white swan to black swan)

While I completely believe this story, makes no sense to talk about "African courts" in general. AFAIK Uganda and Nigeria are countries far from each other, with different forms of government and even different ethnic groups.

There are certain similarities in culture across the sub Saharan countries though. Dunno if you've been there?

> There are certain similarities in culture across the sub Saharan countries though. Dunno if you've been there?

Yes, I've been there and this your assertion is simply not true, unless by "similarities in culture" you mean they are all human. Heck, there's ridiculous variety of culture in the same country - South Africa has 11 official languages, if we are to take language as a proxy for culture.

I've been there as well, and to deny that Sub-Saharian African governments are rife with corruption is simply dishonest on your part.

I did not make that argument - I was talking debunking the "shared culture" idea and rejecting the lack of nuance. Corruption is not cultural - east and west Berlin had different levels of corruption due to something other than culture.

If you think all sub-Saharan African governments have the same levels of corruption, you're plain wrong. As an illustration: (in no particular order) Nigeria, Botswana, Kenya, Rwanda, Zimbabwe have corruption levels that range from "it's expected in every official interaction" to "you (civilian) will wind up in jail if you bring up the idea of a bribe". So there's nothing that's inherently African or cultural about it.

Here's corruption index map: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Transpar...

Any news articles or court documents of these events?

To be fair, you aren't legally allowed to repair the public road outside of your house either. I can't think of any western country that would allow that.

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