My Word's Worth: an occasional column by Marylaine Block

vol. 5, #44, September 24, 2000

WITHOUT MEANS OF SUPPORT

Between some books I've been reading, and a friend who just came back from living in India for a year, I've been learning a lot about what living in a third world country means. Mostly, it means that by our standards, things don't work very well, because the kind of infrastructure we take for granted just isn't there. I'm not just talking about government functions, either; I'm also talking about security, and the availability of basic goods and services.

The first problem is borders. We Americans take it for granted that we can cross 3,000 miles and never have to show a passport, never have to explain why we want to go somewhere, never have to prove we are who we say we are, never have to present a document to get into a neighboring state that we can only get if we are already IN that state. Add border guards who enjoy making other people squirm, or corrupt officials who will only let you pass if you pay them a little off the top, and you have a continent where people and goods don't move very freely.

Free movement would also depend on whether you had decent roads and bridges. And that's not just a matter of building the roads and bridges in the first place; it's also a matter of regular maintenance. Both require money; both require a functioning government to collect taxes and pay the bills, competent engineers and honest contractors, and a system for training them.

Of course if you have roads and bridges, the next question is whether your car functions. Above and beyond rough road conditions, a continent like Africa puts some unusual stresses even on durable vehicles (a naturalist in a forest preseve found monkeys disassembling his car every morning and stealing small parts). And if your car doesn't work, you can't count on the presence of gas stations, skilled mechanics, or spare parts and tires.

If you can't get some place by jeep, perhaps you might want to fly instead. But that requires, at a bare minimum, qualified pilots and safe, well-maintained planes and helicopters, which are a rare commodity (we'll assume that for bush flying you don't need regularly scheduled flights, airports, radar, up to the minute weather reports, and air traffic controllers, which are even less common).

Suppose you wanted to start a manufacturing business in Africa. You couldn't rely on just-in-time delivery of parts and raw materials, because they might get stalled going through customs and might not get delivered by an unreliable transportation system. Suppose you wanted to start a food business; you couldn't count on meat and vegetables getting to you before they rot in the humid heat. Nor could you count on electricity for refrigeration, because the power grids are unreliable. You couldn't count on local government to help you out.

In fact, in countries without widely-respected mechanisms for the smooth transfer of power, you couldn't count on the government and the laws you're dealing with to be the same from one year to the next, which hardly encourages you to invest money in building a plant. Public funds might be siphoned off to make corrupt rulers ridiculously wealthy while the infrastructure goes untended.

If you wanted to start a hospital in Africa, you couldn't count on clean water and sterile surroundings. You couldn't count on keeping drugs and blood supply effective, because you couldn't count on refrigeration or electricity. Many African nations lack not only the medicines but the educational and public information structure that would help them begin to put a dent in the AIDS epidemic.

In cases of emergency, we assume the availability of phones, computers, fax machines. In third world countries, you can't count on any communication system because electric lines and phone lines aren't universally installed or maintained.

We westerners expect to be safe in our homes, and assume the police and courts will protect our belongings and our lives. But in some countries, respect for law can't be counted on -- a mob in Nairobi recently rioted and fired missiles at a court, demanding that it turn the prisoner over to them for instant justice. Law enforcement may be far away, and may not side with foreigners against its own citizens. Indeed, when there's ethnic warfare inside a country, the police and army may not even protect their own citizens, may even be responsible for slaughtering them. Unaware foreigners may be caught in the middle of political struggles conducted with bombs instead of ballots.

Business expects employees to be able to read the blooming manual. That requires a government both willing and able to spend money on its children's education, which further presupposes a government that is stable and honest.

Aside from government infrastructure, an industrial society requires a matching cultural infrastructure. We expect people to be on time and measure time as precisely as we do, though many cultures have a far more relaxed attitude toward both time and work. When businesses hire local managers or franchise owners, they expect honesty, and assume the people they hire won't cheat them or the customers. They expect people to be in the habit of complying with authority.

Which in part is because they expect government to deserve compliance. They expect government to do its basic work honestly and competently. When disaster strikes, they expect government to immediately get to work restoring infrastructure, restoring public safety.

[Of course this is a western view of how well someone else's continent meets our needs, rather than the needs of its own people, who over centuries have developed their own strategies for survival in the African ecology. But those strategies have already been tampered with or destroyed by 19th century colonialism, leaving third world countries standing between two cultures, neither of them entirely functional.]

The only time our country compares to the kind of chaos of the third world is after a major disaster, when all elements of infrastructure are stricken at once. Immediately an elegant choreography begins. Rescue crews start digging out the victims, while medical teams set up field operations. The Red Cross offers food and temporary shelter, while FEMA offers money and hope. Utilities restore gas and power and phone lines, while insurance claims agents inspect the damage and cleanup crews haul it away. The National Guard assists local police, preventing looting and restoring order. Soon the government starts rebuilding roads and bridges -- less than a year after the last California earthquake, most of the roads had already been rebuilt.

We carp about bureaucrats and taxes and government delays, but the way to appreciate the government we have is to compare it with third world countries. Will some of our politicians be making a little more than they should on sweetheart deals? Probably. Will some government workers arrive late and leave early while other government employees are busting their butts? You bet. Will some bureaucrats be tiresomely officious about petty details, while others knock themselves out to do the right thing? Yep? And will Congress continue to sell government favors cheap to their great good friends in corporate America? No question.

And yet, somehow, the work of America gets done, because most government workers do their jobs honestly and competently. That's why we assume clean water will flow from our taps, and our homes will meet fire codes. It's why business assumes it can collect its bills and transport its goods without a hitch.

I wonder if business leaders are as enthusiastic as congress is about the Republican ideal of a wide open, totally unregulated, untaxed environment. Because they've had a chance to see it in action in the third world, and they know it doesn't work all that well, for citizens or for business. Appreciate your government at work, and remember, it could be a LOT worse.

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

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