Quote from Martin Schweiger on March 19, 2019, 10:19 am

I have received the following from a friend of mine.

“On the surface, (people from this country) are very friendly and helpful, but there is a huge undercurrent of selfishness and self-interest in (this country’s) society.

Don't get me wrong, I am married to a woman from (this country) and have a wide network of friends here that mean the world to me. However, most of the problems in the country stem from the fact that a significant majority of people here, of all ages and social classes, have 101 reasons why they are exempt from the laws that govern the country and the basic rules that govern any polite society.

The origin of this is that, regardless of who happens to hold political power at any given time, the country is effectively owned by a handful of families that between them hoard much of the nation's wealth for personal enrichment, they fight amongst each other for supremacy all the time whilst those further down the social ranks suffer.

Government at all levels, including law enforcement, remains corrupt to the core. Each time a new government is elected, its promises to eradicate corruption end up doing nothing more than shifting the balance of the endemic corruption in their own favour.

The police, not only through corruption and often also incompetence, but also through being starved of adequate resources, are utterly incapable of enforcing the law, and everyone knows it. Just a one among number of examples, the appalling traffic situation in (the capital of this country), is made ten times worse than it is due to chronic under-investment in infrastructure by the fact that for every one driver who is punished for running a red light, not having working lights at night or blocking a busy junction, a hundred more drive past the same police or traffic officer doing the self same things. Breaking the law in (this country) is like being a wildebeest running with the herd through the plains of Africa, the authorities are lions, they'll get one or two of you but the multitude is home free.

(People in this country) are also each others' own worst enemies. There is a cult of wealth that means everyone who has money, regardless of whether they earned it themself, considers themself better than those poorer. Rich people employ poor people at disgusting rates of pay, and the poor accept it because they have little choice; many companies refuse to obey minimum wage legislation and other employment law, partly for the same reason as the wildebeest analogy that I made for road use, and partly because when they do get caught, it's easy to pay off corrupt officials and make the problem go away.

That kind of treatment rarely buys loyalty, however, and many poorer folk rip off their employers with alarming regularity. If you employ a building firm to build a tower block, you will probably be helping a number of the construction workers to build or improve their own homes through pilferage of materials from the site.

Friendship and loyalty in (this country) are very much tribal in nature, and many day-to-day relationships are more about meeting mutual need than truly respecting others, I've even seen the dog-eat-dog attitudes here tear apart families because personal need and greed can supersede even the needs of one's own family members.”