Raking in the money

An officer who’s angry because he didn’t get what he wanted





In the Soussou language that is spoken in Guinea, bribes are known as "wo feraba" (“come forward” or “show yourself”) and "wo décompté" (“count yourselves”) because that’s what soldiers and gendarmes often say when people pass through their checkpoints.In reality, these questions mean that the driver will have to pay up. Soldiers or others at a roadblock usually invent a reason to ask for money. Often, they’ll claim that the driver has to hand over money because he or she wasn’t carrying an ID. Other times, they say it is a charge for extra passengers.This extortion might be illegal, but it is common practice. That’s what a 5-minute film made by the NGO National Platform for United Citizens for Development (PCUD, or Plateforme Nationale des Citoyens Unis pour le Développement) found. Their method was simple: they used a mobile phone to secretly film interactions at four different roadblocks to expose the extortion going on there. We’ve selected some sections of the footage they captured.In the excerpt below, for example, several members of the armed forces show off money that they took from drivers who weren’t able to show an ID card.In this excerpt, a man in civilian clothes chastises a driver because he didn’t give him the money required to pass.You can see the full film at the bottom of this article. It shows other instances when the men manning several different roadblocks extorted money. The footage was shot at the KK and Kouria roadblocks on the road that runs from Conakry, the Guinean capital, to Kindia (Guinea’s fourth largest city) as well as the Khoria and Four Points roadblocks on the road that runs from the capital to Tanènè, a town in western Guinea.