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Regional report on road corruption maps bribes and delays
By Julianna White and Elodie Windels
© USAID West Africa Trade Hub
Mali beat out Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Togo
for the dubious distinction of taking the most bribes and having the
most frequent checkpoints on interstate roads, according to the Report on the First Results of the Improved Road-Transport Governance (IRTG) Initiative on Interstate Highways published in July by UEMOA (Union Economique et Monétaire Ouest-Africaine), ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) and the West Africa Trade Hub.
 This excerpt of the corruption report illustrates checkpoints and bribes in Burkina Faso
What they found confirmed the hypothesis that corruption is slowing
down and increasing the price of transport in West Africa, thus
impeding commerce.
In Mali, uniformed officials stop
commercial trucks four to five times every 100km, extracting the
equivalent of USD 25 per 100 km, rendering the Ouagadougou–Bamako
corridor the slowest and most expensive of the three corridors studied.
A transporter recently denounced the treatment inflicted on
Togolese drivers in Burkina Faso and Mali in Les Echos, a Malian newspaper. “It is necessary to pay
300,000 FCFA (USD 600) per truck for the trip from Lomé to Bamako, and
vice versa,” said Mr. Otonki. “We spend about 35,000 FCFA (USD 70) in Togo,
but the majority we have to pay in Burkina Faso and Mali.”
In fact, Togo’s portion of the corridor
was the least corrupt, stopping trucks only one or two times and
extracting USD 3 per 100 km, making the Lomé – Ouagadougou corridor the
most favorable for the trucks. But this route, 1,020 km long,
still includes 18 check points, a number considered too high for many
in the transportation sector.
“No one is opposed to control the roads:
you can’t say that 40 checkpoints per vehicle on one corridor is
normal,” said Augustin Karanga, transportation economist for UEMOA, as
reported in Les Echos on July 10 of this year. “This isn’t control; it’s corruption.”
International cooperation
 IRTG report publication at UEMOA in Ouagadougou
Concerned that bribes and delays on
interstate routes are slowing development in West Africa, conference
participants urged governments to stamp out corruption and insisted on
the establishment of a permanent working group for transportation
stakeholders to continue IRTG activities. Participants hailed from Benin, Burkina, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Togo.
 Booklets of documents required for interstate travel
IRTG (known as OPA in French—Observatoire des Pratiques Anormales)
was established as a cooperative initiative between UEMOA and ECOWAS,
financed by USAID through WATH and World Bank’s Sub-Saharan African
Transport Program. WATH provides technical support. Recently, WATH
published guides to documents required for interstate travel in Burkina Faso and Ghana. Guides for Mali and Togo are due out soon.
For more information about IRTG activities or reports, please visit www.watradehub.com/accra or contact Elodie Windels at
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