I have spent nearly twenty-five years as a priest in Nigeria, most of them in parishes, and much of that time in the ordinary work of holding institutions together — keeping accounts, managing schools, sitting between quarrelling families, and trying to see that what was meant for the poor reached them. This book comes out of that work rather than out of a library.

It is written for the priest who knows that something is badly wrong in the way this country is governed, who has heard corruption denounced from a hundred pulpits including his own, and who suspects, correctly, that denunciation has changed nothing.

It does not ask him to become a politician. It asks something narrower and harder: that he look at the accounts of his own parish, constitute the committee he already has on paper, find two lines in a public budget that concern his own people, and go and see whether what was paid for exists.