It is his honesty that brings him to the front page of Liberian newspapers. Emmanuel Tuloe is 18 years old and a few months ago, on October 10, while driving a motorbike taxi in the capital Monrovia, he found a plastic bag on the side of the road filled with banknotes, 50,000 dollars Americans, a real jackpot in this country where half the population lives on less than two dollars a day. The young man could have kept the sum, but he decides to wait, not to touch the bundles until the owner of the lost treasure comes forward. What happens, a few days later, when a woman explains on the radio that she has misplaced her savings. Emmanuel Tuloe contacts her, gives her back the money and immediately becomes, both the laughing stock of his friends who mock his probity, and conversely a national icon, a model of honesty like no other, an anomaly. , an original.
Liberia taxi driver: How returning $50,000 changed Emmanuel Tuloe’s life https://t.co/1ViZh34c0T
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) April 2, 2022
Quickly, 10,000 dollars of reward are given to him, the president of Liberia, George Weah decorates him with the title “integrity ambassador”, he grants him a monthly salary of 500 dollars and provides him with a new moped, but above all a large American high school offers him his dream: a scholarship. Because here, what Emmanuel Tuloe aspired to was to return to school, where he left the benches at the age of nine on the death of his father to help his family financially. For five months, he has therefore been following the courses of one of the most famous colleges in Liberia while waiting to be able to obtain the equivalent of the patent in a few years and integrate the American high school.
Admittedly, he is much older than his comrades, but he is delighted: “now I can project myself into the futurehe told the BBC, my goal is to study management accounting to advise those in power on the proper use of the country’s money.” A nod to the fact that in Liberia, corruption and embezzlement of public money are commonplace. Hence, also, the success of his story, based on honesty and the unexpected desire to study. The choice by Emmanuel Tuloe illustrates the fact that one can have other goals than money, accumulation, that one can want to be rich in other things, knowledge, encounters, wonders, and other pleasures that cannot be monetized.