CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

334 CAPITALISM’S ACHILLES HEEL
monthly installments. The business, scarcely more than a bucket of bolts,
had one asset. The Speaker was a good friend of the local managing director
of Guinness Brewery, and J.I.M. had a contract to haul stout from Lagos to
a dozen destinations in the north of the country, in the Sahalian area at the
base of the Sahara. Full loads up and empty bottles back was a good deal, if
the business could be operated efficiently. Naïvely, I signed my company up
as managing agent of J.I.M. Transport.
The first thing we had to do was get a life insurance policy on Jalo
Waziri, with Bank of America as beneficiary. He went to a designated doctor,
stepped on the scale, and smashed the pointer against the stop at 20
stones, obviously weighing well over 280 pounds. The doctor begged him to
get off and refused to complete his medical report until an accurate weight
could be obtained. I telephoned the managing director of Avery Scales, a
British company, who suggested that near the parliament building was a
horse scale at the racetrack. I thought about this for an hour, decided that
taking the Speaker of the House to get on a horse scale was no way to start a
relationship, rang the Avery manager back and asked him to come up with
an alternative. An hour later he called back and suggested the scale at the
Ministry of External Affairs used to weigh outgoing diplomatic pouches.
This I could sell; we got the weight, the policy, and the loan extension from
Bank of America.
I talked Mercedes-Benz, Fiat, Leyland, and Volvo into returning the
trucks they had seized for missed payments. With the fleet reconstituted,
J.I.M. was back in business. I fired Jalo Waziri’s underperforming family
members, much to his chagrin. Three months later, in January 1966, Nigeria’s
first coup d’etat occurred, as a group of Ibo army officers assassinated
the prime minister, a respected northerner, and other prominent leaders.
Parliament was suspended and Jalo Waziri adopted a low profile. A countercoup
eight months later put northern military officers in power, but civilian
politicians were still out of favor. The country descended into civil war—the
three-year Biafran conflict—killing perhaps a million people.
I quickly learned the realities of the trucking business in Africa. Once a
vehicle is loaded and out of sight, you cannot control what the driver does.
Overloading the truck by adding private cargo was the norm. Short hauling
to unscheduled destinations was universal. Auctioning off cases of stout on
every trip was standard procedure, claiming the goods were damaged in
transit. Drivers sold their diesel fuel, claiming to run out, and then would