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Vice Blog

GHANA'S SCAMMING BULGE

If you read old man magazines like Foreign Affairs, you may have heard of "Youth Bulge" theory. It draws a correlation between populations with a low median age and a higher occurrence of things like civil unrest, gang/militia membership, and willingness to fill your jacket pockets with 10 kilos of Mother of Satan and walk into the local Denny's because some old guy in a robe told you it'd be a good idea. Basically it puts into overblown think-tank language an idea that most men have internalized since the days of St. Augustine: Kids are fucking terrifying.

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Like using the Department of Education School Search map to predict which train stations you're most likely to get appled in the head at, Youth Bulge says that if you want to guess where the next civil war or terrorist movement is going to start, look for countries full of teens and 20somethings sitting around with nothing to do. In the late 60s this meant places like America, France, and Mexico. In the 70s and 80s there were bulges in Iran, Northern Ireland, and Sri Lanka. And since the 90s, unshockingly, the more violent parts of the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa have been bulging like crazy. The average West African population pyramids looks like something from Rob Halford's buttplug collection.

Now as some pedantic dickwad will point out, "youth bulge" doesn't account for every conflict, but it's still a great way to handicap potential troublespots. Think the Italians will be stringing up Berlusconi and his mistress at the Esso station any time soon? Not unless it's part of some mass mid-life crisis. Ditto those fogies in Germany and Russia.

The other side of this is it doesn't matter as much if a country's youths are bulging, provided there's enough resources/work to go around. Taiwan and South Korea bulged out in the 70s and 80s, but managed to convert all that pent-up angst and horniness into enormous manufacturing sectors and skylines that look like Delta City. The trick is figuring out which way a bulging country will swing, and right now Ghana is straddling the line between Taipei '92 and Tehran '79.

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Ghana is doing extremely well by African standards. Of course "by African standards" means there are dirt roads leading past the brand-new, gold-columned presidential palace, and roughly 1% of the country are blowing their country's GDP at bars with $50 cover charges while the other 99 are selling bags of water at stop lights. They have huge mineral reserves and lots of foreign money invested in their extraction, all of which ends up concentrated in the hands of the president, his cabinet, and whichever of their cousins they're getting along with at the time.

The Ghanaian government likes to boast that their unemployment rate is in the single digits and they're creating millions of new jobs a year specifically targeting the youth bulge, but when you pull up a pile of rubble and sit down with a member of said bulge, the story seems a lot less cheery. The actual unemployment rate for 15- to 24-year-olds hovers between 25 and 30 percent and unless you're a relative or close friend of someone in the ruling class, you can look forward to a long and fruitful career in water sales.

But Ghana also has a reasonably sophisticated technology infrastructure (again, "for Africa") and has declared itself the "Internet Capital of West Africa," which is kind of archly tragic because right now the internet is the only thing keeping the kids at bay.

During Nigeria's oil boom in the 70s, Ghanaians flooded into the country to take guest worker jobs. Within 10 years they'd worn out their welcome and were deported en mass back to Ghana, but not before they'd picked up a popular local pasttime: the Nigerian "pen pal scam." The way it works is you become pen pals with some dolt in America or Britain, bitch about how hard your life is in Africa, then wait for them to send you money and presents. Simple.

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As computers started making their way into the continent, the scam was adapted to email and gradually evolved into the rainbow of weird phishing messages from state treasurers and estates managers and plane-crash lawyers that crowd your inbox every morning. And as scammers got hungrier for bigger pickins, they hooked up with hacker-types from the US and Europe who taught them basic credit card fraud, which they combined with the playacting of the email scam to create increasingly elaborate--and profitable--superscams. Then for some reason they combined all of this shit with black magic, and that's how Sakawa was born.

In the same way that "hip-hop" went from a music style into a descriptor for everything from pants to shitty dancing to potato chips, Sakawa originally referred to a specific credit card scam but now means pretty much anything involving money--if you wear a bunch of flashy brand-name clothes you're dressing "Sakawa," if you've got a nice car it's a "Sakawa" car--all of which makes sense considering internet scamming is the only way most Ghanaians can afford this shit.

Right now Sakawa is in its salad days. The Sakawa Boys movie franchise has made it up to Sakawa Boys 8, Ju ju priests are making a killing enchanting emails, Christian preachers are making a killing complaining about enchanted emails, and Ghanaians of all ages and interests (but mostly "young" and "not being poor") are packed into internet cafes finding more and more ingenious ways of ripping off Westerners.

While a lot of Sakawa practitioners have cooked up elaborate post-colonial justifications where they're just getting the white man back for taking all their gold a few, like our guide Seva, see Sakawa for what it really is: a massive bubble full of machete-weilding rioters just waiting to burst. As Ghana overtakes freaking Nigeria as the e-fraud capital of the world, the government is scrambling to find a way to keep Sakawa from completely wrecking the country's business reputation without causing everyone under 30 from wrecking their faces when the Sakawa tap runs dry. Whichever way it turns out, one thing is sure: The youtube clips are going to be great.

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