West African Truckers (Documentary)

-[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE] -[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE] THOMAS MORTON: Hey, it's Thomas. We're in West Africa. West Africa, in the eyes of huge corporate multinationals like Proctor & Gamble, Nestle, and Unilever, is the last of the great untapped markets. They see the region not for its poverty and AIDS rate and civil wars involving legitimately insane guerrilla armies, but for the 245 million people who could be buying their soap. -Are you ready? THOMAS MORTON: To get their stuff from ports in Ghana and Nigeria to shelves across the West African Savannah, these companies rely, as we do, on long-haul truckers. We're in Lagos, Nigeria. And we're going to go catch a truck and drive that to Ghana, which is 200 miles. So it should only take us like five or six days, depending on a lot of crap. So the first leg of our trip is from Lagos to the border of Benin. We're basically going straight to this little truck depot. This is the office. AGDEBOLA MONSURU: Yeah. THOMAS MORTON: These are the old trucks. AGDEBOLA MONSURU: Yeah. THOMAS MORTON: We're going to go see the new trucks now. Yeah. This is a fine, well-maintained highway. These are pretty good looking trucks. Do you usually go in like-- what do you call it? Like a convoy? Who would attack you, though? Who attacks people? Oh, OK. All right. Engines are revving up. And then we've got, like, a literal ton of soap. The truck-- a brand new Chinese-made cab. The driver's named Osama. I think everything's going to be good. The road's paved. But there's a lot of potholes that you have to stop and kind of roll through them carefully. I'm about to fall asleep, though. We need to get some tunes going, or something. I'm zonked, dude. Less than an hour into our trip, we hit the backed up traffic for the Nigeria-Benin border crossing, about three miles back from the border itself. All right. OK. Yeah. That seems pretty far back. How long do you think it will take? Oh, OK. Trucking in West Africa takes forever. Despite the presence of ECOWAS, a trade organization created in the '70s to promote and streamline West African commerce, border regulations and even hours vary widely between the 15 member countries. It's not uncommon for a semi trying to exit Nigeria with a full trailer of butter to spend several days waiting for their goods to be inspected by customs, then navigating the red tape and straight up bribery involved in clearing immigration. So what do they have to do now? They have to pay export taxes? OSAMA: Yes. THOMAS MORTON: These hold-ups turn 200-mile trips into multi-day, sometimes multi-week tracks, and ratchet up the price of the goods being shipped with every stop. They also lead to informal economies wherever the trucks are parked-- not the kind of economies that further the interests of Nestle and Unilever, but more of the JT LeRoy variety. So we're following these guys to the custom's office. This is Seme, it's basically a border town. This is like the El Paso of Nigeria and Benin. It's a little seedy. This is kind of the government area, so it's a little nicer. The other side is basically a shanty town. THOMAS MORTON: Well, there's something that's kind of light-colored and doughy, and I take that and I dip it into this thing, which is sort of dark and granular with a tangy sort of juice it's soaking. I want to say it's beef and some sort of flour, but I can't be sure because there are not lights on here, and it is nighttime. A lot of people at the boarder, but not entirely too much to do. The one thing there is plenty of to do is pick up hookers. As a truck stops in America, prostitution is the most profitable, if not visible business activity in the gridlocked villages. And with the 20 to 25% *** rate among local lot lizards, truckers are not just the lifeblood of West African trade, but also the spread of AIDS. It's 10:30. And we just came back behind the bar and met some new friends. We're just hanging out, talking about what it's like on the border. What is it like on the border? On our way out of the brothel, some police grabbed us and detained us at their station for a few hours, giving us only two options of soda and several bottles of cashews to eat and drink. It was harrowing. -Welcome to Nigeria. THOMAS MORTON: So it's noon. We've been at the border close to 24 hours now. They brought us into a conference room and gave us cookies and coffee, kind of all smiles and apologies for basically detaining us for three hours for no reason last night. Things got a bit heated. Suicide was threatened in a kind of weird way. And it's funny, because it sort of exemplifies exactly the kind of crap that the truckers have to go through, too, to get their stuff through the boarder. So we're in the border right now. -Show us your cards, please, sirs. OSAMA: We've already done this. -I know. Present your cards, please. OSAMA: OK. THOMAS MORTON: I'm not sure how any of this works. And I'm kind of not sure they really know how it works on either side. JAKE BURGHART: No one's wearing uniforms. JASON MOJICA: Uniforms or anything. JAKE BURGHART: I don't know who you are. JASON MOJICA: Were those dudes officials? Or were those dudes just angry because of all of us riding? -Each one of those is a checkpoint. THOMAS MORTON: So we're here on Benin side of the border. And we're basically in the same situation we were in on the Nigerian side, which is like 500 yards that way, but in French. It's mind-numbing bureaucracy. And it's also extraordinarily just frustrating and boring. You're just waiting constantly. And basically we'd be doing a better job on a horse, I feel like. After being kicked out of the border area by cops and a bunch of guys in shorts, we decided to hit the beach to wait for our truckers. I don't know where this trip goes from here. So it's 8:30, going on 9:00. We are still right here at the Benin-Nigerian border. We're waiting on our trucks. So over the course of two full days, we've crossed one border and made it a whopping 60 miles to our destination-- basically an hour's drive in America, provided you drive like a nerd. And our trucks won't even be ready to leave until morning because Beninese customs keeps French hours, in tribute to their former colonial master. In other words, everyone *** off early and sleeps in. Hi. And we're in Togo. All right. Cool. Whew. It's 10:30 again. We gained an hour by coming into Togo, which is good, because we lost an hour in Benin because they thought we were spies. We lost our trucks. We've got to go find them somewhere up their road. Maybe some of these motorcycle taxi kids can take us there. That'd be a little more exciting than riding in a truck for a second. So having lost our truckers, been 86ed from almost every hotel in Togo, become apocalyptically sick from either food poisoning or washing our hands in tap water, we decided to wait with some of the stalled trucks lined up in front of the Ghana border and try to rethink our plans and lives. That's where we met the motoboys. If the backbone of the West African economy is the independent trucker, then the introvertible discs that keep its spine articulate are their apprentices, the motoboys. Where the contemporary West African trucker leads a fairly cushy lifestyle and has the reputation of an itinerant Lothario, motoboys are basically Dickensian urchin children who do odd jobs, help keep the truck clean and running, and watch over the parked goods while the driver goes off to get drunk and laid-- and sometimes AIDS. So how long have you been at this border? -[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE] -Is this normal? Like, a week? -[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE] -Jesus Christ. So what do you do you? -[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE] THOMAS MORTON: While the drivers at least have money to partake in the diversions these border towns have to offer, their motoboys are left to fend off days of boredom the old fashioned way, by goofing around. These dudes are so bored. So we're done with hit stick now. We're playing orange soccer. What kind of fun do drivers have? -[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE] THOMAS MORTON: Do the girls ever come down here for the motoboys, or-- -[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE] -[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE] -[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE] THOMAS MORTON: Oh, no. No, she isn't. THOMAS MORTON: How did you become a motoboy? Like why did you decided to start working on trucks? -[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE] THOMAS MORTON: Motoboys rely on their driver's beneficence, not just for food and the occasional-- very occasional-- beer, but to teach them the ropes and help them eventually get their own rig. Becoming a driver doesn't just take time and learning, though. Getting your license and ECOWAS Brown-card cost money, which can take years to save up from driver's handouts. And that's provided they don't just ditch you for a younger and cheaper motoboy, which happens a lot. -[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE] THOMAS MORTON: After dinner, we got a call from our truckers, who'd made better time without us through the Ghana border and were already in Accra-- which is great for people who need to buy soap, but not so hot for us getting a lift home. While our truckers work for a multinational company with enough clout and money to make it through 288 miles of borders, police checkpoints, and random stops in a bustling four days, their success means very little to the motoboys we'd been hanging out with-- most of whom had been at that border longer than our entire trip and were still there when we left. It means even less to furthering trade in West Africa, at least for anybody who isn't a billion dollar corporation. The old line free marketeers like to use that flooding an economy with money means the rising tide lifts all boats. In the '80s, this got tempered into the trickle-down effect. But in a system marked by 50 years of completely unchecked corruption, money doesn't even trickle. It simply goes straight into the hand of whoever's clever enough to grab it first, all of which leaves the kids at the very bottom of pipeline, our motoboys, as likely to make a living from trucking as American kids are from playing professional sports-- provided they don't just join some guerrilla army first.