I'm amused to read about a Dutch drug hitman who has apparently "captured" the entire African nation of Sierra Leone, effectively making its government and security forces dance to his tune. The Economist reports:
In the shadowy world of international narco-trafficking, Jos Leijdekkers is a gangster of flair. Over the past five years, bricks of cocaine stamped with his underworld moniker—“Holly”, short for Hollywood—have been found everywhere from the Ecuadorian banana port of Guayaquil to the North Sea. In his native Netherlands, his exploits have spawned biographies, podcasts, comedy skits, battalions of YouTube sleuths and, this February, a portrait of his unsmiling face and a seven-foot knife blade, spraypainted on a railway carriage in the somnolent city of Eindhoven. For criminologists, Leijdekkers’s career is a marvel. Less than a decade ago he was a hitman stalking the streets of Antwerp. He has since created a trafficking network spanning Latin America, Europe and the Middle East that brings in more than $2bn a year.
Leijdekkers’s greatest caper yet looks to be the takeover of a country. In half a decade Leijdekkers has turned Sierra Leone, a place previously best known for blood diamonds, into a hub for billions of dollars’ worth of Colombian cocaine, disguised as rice or plantain chips, which pass through each year en route to Europe. By funnelling a share of the profits to Sierra Leone’s political elite and funding large parts of the state itself, Leijdekkers has amassed perks that would be the envy of a Bond villain. He is believed to have a Sierra Leonean diplomatic passport. The police and military establishment bow to him, squadrons of container ships and submarines ply the shores at his command, and he is escorted in a motorcade by the presidential guard beneath a cloud of drones. Leijdekkers is celebrated in krio rap, the English-based creole spoken in Sierra Leone—“Ar change di game e name lek Umar Sheriff” runs a lyric of Drizilik’s recent hit “Sabi Road”—and, last September, he fathered a child with Agnes Bio, the president’s favourite daughter.
Go to Freetown today and behold a nation in the throes of narco-capture. Its beaches thrum with nightclubs, its skyline bristles with empty highrises, its streets shimmer with Corvettes and Tesla trucks. It took gangs decades to transform Mexico and Montenegro. In Sierra Leone it has taken just four years for a 35-year-old Dutch convict, boasting little more than a smartphone and a network of suppliers, to transform a beautiful stretch of west Africa into his personal fief. How did he do it?
There's much more at the link (which may be behind a paywall: if so, you'll find an archived, paywall-free version here).
It's yet another variation on an old, familiar African theme. A strong man arises, and forces or subverts a tribe or clan or entire nation to bend the knee to him. How he does it may vary from criminal or military force, through tribal loyalties, to plain old-fashioned bribery and corruption. Sierra Leone is a very clear example of the latter. (It's nothing new there - consider the RUF catastrophe a few decades ago.)
How do we fix such situations? There are two ways. One is to cut off the offender's supply of cash, so that he can no longer bribe his way to the top. That's difficult to do when it comes to illegal drugs, because that business is awash in "dirty" cash, and it has myriad ways to flow around the globe. It can be done, but it's an enormously complicated (and expensive) process. The other way is much simpler: remove the bad guy from society. You can do that like a Maduro, snatching him from his secure compound, or you can do it by the judicious application of ballistics and/or high explosives.
Whatever method you choose, it presents the problem that it only removes one offender. Pretty soon, others will be lining up to replace him. The most vicious, most corrupt, wealthiest and most ruthless of them will rise to the top of a new sewer, until his turn comes to be replaced . . . and then the process will repeat itself ad nauseam. It always does.
I suspect Mr. Leijdekkers is going to find out, very shortly, that he's become too conspicuous in his success. Western governments don't like being upstaged or embarrassed by flamboyant criminals. I think he'll shortly either have to disappear into obscurity, or be disappeared into eternity. As for Sierra Leone itself? Well, if they really want to solve that country's problems, they could always hire the modern equivalent of Executive Outcomes. That company sorted out Sierra Leone's security issue very quickly, and very successfully, in the 1990's - until international squeamishness and political correctness got in its way. Bring it back, and there'd be much less turmoil in West Africa as a whole. (There would also be a whole lot of pissed-off leftist politicians and diplomats, which would be a satisfactory bonus.)
Peter
