Frankly, I think this concept has been overtaken by climate models - the building consensus of future climate change in Africa is that the southern margin of the Sahara is more likely to retreat than to advance. Unless we drop the ball and decide that reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations is somehow harmless.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
In the name of being honest
AP: Nigerian electricity union strike causes nationwide blackout.
The nationwide blackout began in the afternoon moments after the union called a strike to protest non-payment of benefits for former members and other issues related to working conditions, the Transmission Company of Nigeria said.
“Several 330kV transmission lines and 33kV feeder lines across the power system network had been switched off by the union members resulting in ... multiple voltage escalations at critical stations and substations,” company spokeswoman Ndidi Mbah said in a statement,
Mbah said talks with the union had been underway for several days but had not been fruitful.
About 12 hours after the company’s statement, power was restored in parts of the country after the electricity workers’ union said it called off the strike.
On social media, many people had voiced their anger and frustration over the strike, which they said worsened the plight of many businesses and homes already running on gasoline-powered generators as a result of inadequate electricity supply.
Such strikes in addition to the poor generation of power and the frequent collapse of the electricity grid have been blamed for the poor electricity supply that has been a decades-long challenge for many Nigerians.
As many as 92 million Nigerians lacked access to electricity in 2020, more than any other country in the world, according to the World Bank-backed Energy Progress Report 2022.
Beware the Crazy Man.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Curious about this. Got some links?
^Forced Sahel rainfall trends in the CMIP5 archive, the abstract does not note however that their precipitation maps indicate increased precipitation over most of the Sahel.
In the name of being honest
Al Jazeera: No longer at ease: Pastoralist attack survivors unsettled in Nigeria.
“Ade-lo-wo … Ade-a-gbo,” the 50-year-old muttered after a long silence, painfully stringing the syllables of her late husband’s name.
On June 5, 2021, he had stepped out after receiving calls that nomadic herdsmen had laid siege to their town, Igangan, some 176km (109 miles) away from Lagos. The next time she saw him, his body was ridden with bullets, one of 11 deaths during the attack.
Before that episode, Igangan and six neighbouring towns – all in Oyo state – had experienced a number of clashes stemming from disagreements between Indigenous Yoruba farmers and nomadic Fulani herdsmen.
At the root of the crisis is cattle grazing on farmlands across Nigeria but the battle for resources has been exacerbated by climate change across the Sahel, worsening economic conditions and in some cases, ethnicity and religion; the nomads are mostly Muslim and the farmers are predominantly Christians.
Entire villages have been displaced and schools closed for successive sessions. Interstate food supply chains are disrupted as cattle markets have been razed and farmers have been unable to tend to their crops or have seen them destroyed.
In central Nigeria, the hotspot, as many as 13 million people are at risk of hunger, the World Food Programme said earlier this year.
Between 2016 and 2018, there were 3,641 deaths nationwide due to the conflict, according to Amnesty International. The majority of the reported victims were Indigenes and herdsmen were reported as the aggressors, launching deadly raids frequently.
But even in the southwest, where interfaith households are common and religious tolerance is deemed the highest nationwide, these clashes have become rife. In recent years, it has morphed into more dangerous dimensions involving kidnappings, rape, highway robberies, and coordinated destruction of farmlands.
In 2019, an anti-open grazing law addressing what many experts have identified as the root cause of the disagreements – resource sharing – was passed into law in Oyo. But it has not yet been implemented.
Two years later, as attacks in Igangan continued without perpetrators being apprehended, non-state actors led by a Yoruba ethnic rights activist, Sunday Adeyemo Igboho, demolished property belonging to Fulani residents.
Residents told Al Jazeera that this eviction and the controversies that followed likely spurred the June 5 attack.
Growing distrust
According to a report [PDF] by the International Crisis Group, factors that have allowed Nigeria’s pastoralist crisis to fester range from impunity and eroding confidence in the country’s security forces to the government’s poor response to early warnings.
For years, the national security architecture has been overstretched by armed groups running riot in northeast, northwest and central Nigeria.
In January 2020, as cases of insecurity spiked in southwest Nigeria, the six state governors in the region agreed to create a regional security network. It was codenamed Amotekun (Yoruba for leopard). The federal government kicked against the move citing constitutional concerns so the governors redesigned it into a state-based security vigilante to support the police, which is controlled by Abuja.
In Oyo State, the outfit launched in November 2020.
Even though the June 2021 attack remains the last full-scale one coordinated by herdsmen on residents of any of the seven neighbouring towns, residents told Al Jazeera that neither the recent reduction in attacks nor the government’s efforts had eased their fears.
Matthew Page, an associate fellow at the UK-based think-tank Chatham House, says their decision not to trust the authorities’ promise of safety is justified, explaining that “security agencies are ineffective because authorities have tolerated endemic corruption and turned a blind eye to their operational failures”.
Idayat Hassan, director of Abuja-based CDD, agreed, saying it is difficult for residents to trust the state because it has lost the monopoly of violence.
“The inability of the state to respond even when furnished with information ahead of attacks also makes citizens believe they are either complicit or abetting,” she said. “This further eroded the thin trust existing between citizens and governments.”
Peace and unease
Before her husband’s death, Adeagbo was a housewife who occasionally engaged in farmwork but her mental health has begun to suffer since and she can no longer work.
“When her husband died, she suffered a serious emotional issue,” her brother, Akeem Rasheed, told Al Jazeera. “Her husband’s death and the unavailability of resources to cater for her kids pushed her to the brink.”
Initially, he took her to the closest neuropsychiatric hospital, 77km [48 miles] from the town, for treatment. After two months, he had to take her back home because he could no longer afford her hospital bills.
“They allowed me to take her away only because I promised to keep bringing her for regular check-ups, something I have not done because I don’t have money again,” Rasheed said.
As her mental state declines, her family is clinging to the hope that she will get better and that the town will not be attacked again.
But despite no attacks in recent months, residents of other communities in the region are choosing pragmatism over hope.
Across villages in Ogun state, next door to Lagos, residents are relocating to the neighbouring Benin Republic. One of them is Clement Oyebanjo, a teacher in Agbon village who moved there briefly last February after an attack in his village killed four people.
“We are not at ease and sleep with our eyes half open because we know as long as open-grazing is not banned, these Fulani herders will come back,” says Oyebanjo who is prepared to return to Benin if another attack happens.
‘Violence entrepreneurs’
After Igangan was attacked in June, its residents created a new vigilante group. One of its members was Emmanuel Oguntoyinbo whose younger brother was shot dead on his motorcycle by the attackers while returning from a party.
“We, the youths of the town, that decided that we needed to do that because initially, the community employed some vigilantes from outside, but when the government refused to pay, they left,” the 35-year-old told Al Jazeera.
Every night, armed with Dane guns and charms, they take positions across the town while others patrol strategic places in groups. The community’s youth leader, Olayiwola Olusegun, told Al Jazeera that every household contributes money every month to provide ammunition.
In Agbon, the local vigilante group continues to recruit new members. In neighbouring Ibeku, residents are now wary of visitors and report unknown faces immediately to the town’s traditional ruler.
In Ondo State, dozens of elder residents of communities like Okeluse and Molege, have fled too, while youths who stayed behind have picked up arms to protect themselves.
Meanwhile, Wasiu Olatunbosun, Oyo State commissioner for information, told Al Jazeera the government had put in place the machinery to secure towns like Igangan. He insisted that residents who claim to stay up at night because of their fear of another attack must be opposition members.
For experts like Page, the outcome of these dynamics could be an “expansion of violence entrepreneurs” and more instability even if residents embracing self-defence is justified.
The only difference, he said, between “a vigilante, political thug, insurgent, or bandit is for whom or what cause he fights”.
Organized Canine Bureau Special Agent
A trial's starting at Guinea regarding atrocities committed when Moussa Dadis Camara was in power in 2009.
Organized Canine Bureau Special Agent
Coup is starting against the junta.
Another coup against the military government in Burkina Faso has occurred. Curfew has been imposed and land and sea borders are closed.
Organized Canine Bureau Special Agent
BBC reports that Ministry of Armed Forces (formerly French MOD) is considering drawdown of troops from Sahel, owning to local discontent thanks in part to pro-Russian disinformation and perhaps keeping an eye on Ukraine.
"Exit muna si Polgas. Ang kailangan dito ay si Dobermaxx!"
In the name of being honest
Sure, it's about Russian disinformation and not at all about the French propping up Boubacar Keita's abusive security forces, allying with Tuareg secessionists, exacerbating resource war dynamics in the countryside and generally speedrunning every mistake that the US made in Afghanistan over 20 years. Shame about the Malians who are going to be stuck with the gentle caress of Wagner mercs for the foreseeable future, though.
Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)
Funny considering that the Legion of Lost Souls used to fight the Tuaregs back in the day.
People really don't know how to draw the line between "Russia is taking advantage of a pre-existing issue to their personal benefit" and "Russia is behind the whole thing" and it's annoying as fuck.
Also, what's the ongoing issue with the Tuareg secessionists? The one group that tried declaring an independent state wound up allying with the French forces, right?
Edited by Diana1969 on Nov 8th 2022 at 11:54:25 AM
Organized Canine Bureau Special Agent
I think the BBC reported on the latter part with the MAF deciding to shift priorities to Ukraine.
And I forgot the Malian group name, but I think they did.
PS - Can’t wait to see Wagner’s results later on in Africa.
"Exit muna si Polgas. Ang kailangan dito ay si Dobermaxx!"
On the positive side, good news from Senegal and The Gambia. They got a new bridge up.
The driver, Cheikh Oumar Tamba, had only one more stop to make, just two days after loading his truck with slabs of butter in the capital, Dakar. That, though, wasn’t the only reason for his good mood.
This drive used to take much longer. But with the construction of a towering bridge across the Gambia River, one of the region’s biggest traffic bottlenecks is now gone — a tangible example of the positive impact that much-needed infrastructure projects are having on people’s lives in West Africa.
Before the Senegambia Bridge was inaugurated three years ago, hundreds of truck drivers moving goods south from Dakar would need to line up for a ferry, sometimes waiting days to cross. Fruit would rot. Milk delivered by Mr. Tamba would go rancid. Ambulances would remain stuck in the mile-long line.
“We used to have to bribe the ferry folks to cross faster,” said Mr. Tamba, 45, who has been cruising West African roads for a dozen years. “That bridge has made our lives much easier.”
Also, ferries would operate during daylight only, cutting the north from the south when darkness fell.
“It didn’t matter what kind of emergency you had at night, it was impossible to cross,” said Ousman Gajigo, an economist at the Africa Development Bank who grew up in Gambia.
The ferries could be dangerous, whether crossing the Gambia or instead going by the ocean on routes that connected coastal ports in the south with Dakar. In 2002, one ferry, the Joola, capsized in the Atlantic, killing more than 1,800 people.
The lack of bridges straddling the Gambia River had also exacerbated a sense of regional divide, with residents of the southern Casamance region, Senegal’s food basket, blaming the government in Dakar for keeping them disconnected from the rest of the country. Earlier this year, separatist rebels in the south signed a peace deal with the government, bringing hope that a 40-year, slow-burning conflict — one of the longest in Africa — could finally end.
The ferry crossing itself is not in Senegal but in Gambia, a thin strip of a country, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to nearly 200 miles inland, that splits Senegal into northern and southern parts.
Gambia’s former strongman president, Yahya Jammeh, had long refused to build a bridge during his 22-year rule, using his country’s geographical position as a source of leverage against its bigger neighbor. Only after decades of political negotiations did the long-delayed construction project kick off in 2015, two years before Mr. Jammeh was forced into exile but when he was already facing intensifying pressure for change. In 2019, the presidents of Gambia and Senegal traveled across the bridge in the same car.
For a toll of about $7.50, a trip once measured in days now takes minutes.
In the southern Senegalese city of Madina Wandifa, not far from the Gambian border, Abdoul Aziz Faye was resting on the side of the road while his boss ran some errands. They had delivered medicines from Dakar to Guinea-Bissau, and were about to drive back north over the bridge.
“Home tonight, hopefully,” the 25-year-old driver said about Dakar, an E.T.A. that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
It’s not just the truckers who have benefited.
“I can leave this morning, drop passengers on the other side of Senegal, and be back by 2 p.m. to have lunch with my wife,” said Samba Diop, waiting for his minibus to fill at a bus station in Kaolack, the last Senegalese hub before the northern Gambian border.
Many people in Gambia and the surrounding regions of Senegal live off the production of groundnuts, rice and vegetables, but the lack of reliable transport infrastructure that could link farms to markets had kept most of them in poverty, according to the African Development Bank, which financed the construction of the $67 million bridge.
In October last year, the Gambian authorities inaugurated a second, smaller bridge in the eastern part of the country, financed by China.
For all the progress the Senegambia Bridge has brought, the journey south is not without its bumps, both literal and metaphorical, with the peaceful river flowing through mangrove swamps and salt flats just one of the many obstacles on the road.
In Gambia, where many wait for the authorities to prosecute those accused of committing wide-ranging atrocities under Mr. Jammeh’s rule, there were at least five checkpoints on a 15-mile trip from border to border.
And after Gambia? “That’s another story,” said Mr. Diop, the minibus driver.
Although President Macky Sall of Senegal has conducted major infrastructure projects in the north, critics say the south has been neglected, with its terrible roads a prime example.
As soon as those traveling south cross back into Senegal from Gambia, thousands of potholes littering the road await, as if armies of moles had turned Casamance into their personal playground. The 90-mile journey from the border to Ziguinchor, the main city in the Casamance region, is an ordeal that can take half a day.
“Better roads must be on Senegal’s agenda now,” Mr. Diop said.
Despite the benefits the bridge has brought, its building has also devastated the livelihoods of those who once lived off the hundreds of idling vehicles, and their hungry, thirsty and bored passengers.
On a recent afternoon at the river’s edge below the bridge, Lamarana Diallo was waiting for his first client of the day. No one had yet stopped to sip on his ataya, Senegalese mint tea. A father of four, Mr. Diallo used to make around $30 on a typical day, but now he said he was lucky if he earned $1.50.
Where once there were hundreds of fellow vendors selling clothes, sweets and meals, there are now only two left.
By the river’s pier, the few shops and ticket offices have been abandoned. A dozen Gambian military personnel were stationed there, chain smoking, eating thieboudienne, Senegal’s national dish of fish and rice, and chatting about soccer.
The Senegambia Bridge is open 24/7, but the job protecting it is “chill,” said Sgt. Lamin Badjie, the structure soaring over the barracks. In the sometimes complicated relationship between Senegal and Gambia, it was a welcome new connection between the two countries, Sergeant Badjie said.
Citing the ethnic groups he and comrades belonged to — Serer, Soninke, Mandinka, groups that also populate Senegal — Sergeant Badjie said about the bridge, “It makes us more united. We’re the same people.”
Omar Ndaw, a 36-year-old undercover Gambian police officer, said the bridge helped him navigate more smoothly in the areas he patrols. A surge in trafficking of counterfeit diazepam, a drug used to treat anxiety and alcohol withdrawal, has kept him busy this year.
“Let’s just say the bridge helps everyone — me, and the community,” Mr. Ndaw said before starting off in his used red Nissan.
A minute later, his car was out of sight on the bridge. He had crossed the river.
In the name of being honest
that Lagos will be home to 24.5 million people.
What is happening in Lagos is happening across the continent. Today, Africa has 1.4 billion people. By the middle of the century, experts such as Edward Paice, author of Youthquake: Why Africa’s Demography Should Matter to the World, believe that this number will have almost doubled. By the end of this century, the UN projects that Africa, which had less than one-tenth of the world’s population in 1950, will be home to 3.9 billion people, or 40% of humanity.
These are staggering numbers, but they do not tell the full story. We need to zoom in closer. It is in cities where most of this astounding demographic growth will occur. Once we begin to think along these lines, what is at stake becomes even clearer. Much western commentary on Africa’s population growth has been alarmist and somewhat parochial, focusing on what this means for migration to Europe. The question of how African nations manage the fastest urbanisation in human history will certainly affect how many millions of its people seek to stay or leave. A recent continental survey by a South African foundation, for example, found that 73% of young Nigerians expressed an interest in emigrating within the next three years. But given its scale, this is a story with far larger implications than population movements alone, shaping everything from global economic prosperity to the future of the African nation state and the prospects for limiting climate crisis.
There is one place above all that should been seen as the centre of this urban transformation. It is a stretch of coastal west Africa that begins in the west with Abidjan, the economic capital of Ivory Coast, and extends 600 miles east – passing through the countries of Ghana, Togo and Benin – before finally arriving at Lagos. Recently, this has come to be seen by many experts as the world’s most rapidly urbanising region, a “megalopolis” in the making – that is, a large and densely clustered group of metropolitan centres. When its population surpassed 10 million people in the 1950s, the New York metropolitan area became the anchor of one of the first urban zones to be described this way – a region of almost continuous dense habitation that stretches 400 miles from Washington DC to Boston. Other regions, such as Japan’s Tokyo-Osaka corridor, soon gained the same distinction, and were later joined by other gigantic clusters in India, China and Europe.
But the Abidjan-Lagos stretch now stands to become the granddaddy of them all. In just over a decade from now, its major cities will contain 40 million people. Abidjan, with 8.3 million people, will be almost as large as New York City is today. The story of the region’s small cities is equally dramatic. They are either becoming major urban centres in their own right, or – as with places like Oyo in Nigeria, Takoradi in Ghana, and Bingerville in Ivory Coast – they are gradually being absorbed by bigger cities. Meanwhile, newborn cities are popping into existence in settings that were all but barren a generation ago. When one includes these sorts of places, the projected population for this coastal zone will reach 51 million people by 2035, roughly as many people as the north-eastern corridor of the US counted when it first came to be considered a megalopolis.
But unlike that American super-region, whose population long ago plateaued, this part of west Africa will keep growing. By 2100, the Lagos-Abidjan stretch is projected to be the largest zone of continuous, dense habitation on earth, with something in the order of half a billion people.
“I have worked in China and in India, and that is where most of the attention on cities has been until fairly recently, but Africa is unquestionably the continent that will drive the future of urbanisation. And it is that strip along the coast of west Africa where the biggest changes are coming,” said Daniel Hoornweg, a scholar of urbanisation at Ontario Tech University. “If it can develop efficiently, the region will become more than the sum of its parts – and the parts themselves are quite big. But if it develops badly, a tremendous amount of economic potential will be lost, and in the worst of cases, all hell could break loose.”
The first time I travelled along this stretch of coast was in the late 1970s, on a long road trip to Nigeria from Ivory Coast, where my family then lived. My father, who ran a 20-country healthcare training programme for the World Health Organization, had a meeting to attend in Lagos, and he decided to invite my brothers and me along for the ride. At the time I was a first-year college student in the US, but it was the summer holidays, and I was excited to jump aboard a clattering old-school grey Land Rover for the trip.
He followed a route traced out on a well-worn, foldable Michelin map. It did not take long to discover that many of the routes marked on the map in red – supposedly signifying national or international highways – were little more than two-lane asphalt roads, some of which had long ago been chewed to oblivion by heavy trucking traffic, or eroded by years of seasonal rains. The secondary or tertiary roads, traced more faintly in yellow and white, signalled far greater challenges: jarring dirt paths that were more like trails than highways. These would leave our bodies aching and caked with dust. For long stretches, the west African countryside was so empty that we had to carry our own fuel in jerry cans.
One unfortunate artefact of this region’s imperial history is that, while the British and French built roads and railways to transport agricultural commodities and minerals from the hinterlands of their colonies to modern ports – where they could be shipped home for great profit – in their intense imperial rivalry, they did little to connect their respective possessions. But by 1992, when I took another long drive along this coast, a stretch of highway had been built on either side of the frontier between Ivory Coast and Ghana circumventing a coastal lagoon, and relegating the old picturesque but chancy border-crossing ferry to quaint memory. Back then, few could have imagined the full scope of the changes coming to this stretch of coast – though, in retrospect, some of the signs were already clear.
As late as 1980, Lagos had still seemed like a series of modest towns barely stitched together by its highways and bridges. By the early 90s, though, it had exploded in size, and was already choking on itself. It had become notorious for some of the world’s worst traffic jams, known locally as go-slows. Abidjan, the region’s second-largest city, had also begun to morph. Its suburbs were expanding, thrusting toward the border with Ghana to the east. The other national and economic capitals of this region – Accra in Ghana, Lomé in Togo and Cotonou in Benin – were likewise starting to mushroom.
But it was on more recent trips, in the 2010s, that I saw the urban revolution transforming west Africa coming into full view. By then, Ivory Coast had laid down a true highway all the way from Abidjan to its border with Ghana. Abidjan had gobbled up early colonial capitals like Bingerville and the postcard-pretty but long-stagnant beach town of Grand-Bassam, turning them into dormitory communities. The roadside scenery during a drive from border to border along the Ghanaian coast bore no resemblance to the lightly peopled landscapes of earlier decades. Towns and cities were strung together one after another along nearly the entire route. For long stretches, one scarcely ever left an urban environment.
As always in this region, Lagos is where the most dramatic changes are visible. As it swells, the city is shooting thick urban tendrils west toward the border with Benin – the slender, francophone nation of 12 million people next door – rendering much of that country’s economy a satellite not so much of Nigeria, but of Lagos itself. (If Lagos state were an independent country, its economy would rank as the fourth-biggest in Africa.)
Led by Lagos, as coastal west Africa’s urbanisation gathers pace, and populations and regional commerce begin to surge across old imperial borders, the lives of tens of millions of people along the coastal corridor are changing in ways that neither colonial designs nor six decades of independent government seem to have remotely anticipated.
Earlier this year, I returned to the coast, this time not for one long road trip, but for a series of shorter forays by car in Ghana, Togo and Benin. Everywhere I went, the speed and scale of the historic transformations under way were evident. In Ghana, I visited a place I had encountered on previous trips, Takoradi, and its conjoined twin, the railroad town of Sekondi. In 1980, the two towns together counted 197,000 people. This year, their population surpassed a threshold that only 14 American cities have ever reached: 1 million people, a more than five-fold increase in little more than a generation.
On the July morning I returned to Takoradi, it was the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha, or Tabaski, and the narrow downtown streets were packed with young celebrants from the local Muslim minority, all dressed colourfully in flowing laced robes. When the centre of Takoradi was built, more than a century ago, the city was Ghana’s lone port. It was here that Kwame Nkrumah famously returned by ship from England in 1947, emerging from obscurity to lead his country, then a British colony known as the Gold Coast, to independence 10 years later. In their fading pastel and dreary grey tones, the verandaed buildings of the old downtown looked like the set of a period drama. Just beyond here, though, the antiquated scene gave way to an enormous construction site, where a highway flyover was rising above dusty streets. Once complete, it will allow traffic to bypass the old, outgrown centre in favour of the much larger modern periphery, where most of the city’s people now live.
At Takoradi’s western edge, I stopped at a new shopping mall where, on the shelves of a busy supermarket, I found South African wines, Swiss chocolates, cellophane packs of the same brand of fresh blueberries I eat every day in New York, and – an even more surefire sign of disposable income – expensive canned dog food. There were also Portuguese and Chinese restaurants, a beauty salon, mobile phone shops and a bridal gown dealer doing brisk business.
It is not immediately obvious where the income necessary to sustain this kind of commercial strip comes from. Some surely derives from work in the offshore oil business based nearby, some from a recently expanded regional port, some from a combination of old-line cocoa farming and new jobs in tech. And this points to the reality of what makes this megaregion so distinctive from earlier ones. Since at least the 18th century, as the writings of Hegel and Hume show, Africa has been widely regarded in the west as if it existed outside the flow of history – scarcely a participant in the global present, and even less relevant to the future. This has never been true, but those who cling on to such misapprehensions would do well to visit this stretch of coastline. In Lagos, Accra, Abidjan, or even in much smaller places like Takoradi, meanwhile, globalised enclaves with strong links to the rich world jostle with expanses of ragged urbanity, half hopefully striving, half congealed in poverty.
On another morning, I drove from the heart of Ghana’s capital, Accra, to the city of Kasoa, less than 20 miles away. Kasoa is sometimes touted as one of the fastest-growing conurbations on the continent. When I made my first trips along this coast in the 70s, it was little more than a shambling collection of rural roadside traders’ stalls. In 1984, Kasoa had 3,000 people. Scarcely a decade ago, its population was just shy of 70,000. Now it is home to roughly half a million people, equal to Edinburgh or Tucson.
The view from an overpass above Kasoa on the coastal highway is a reminder that cities throughout Africa have tended to sprawl outwards, rather than upward. There is little high-rise housing here, and few tall buildings of any kind. From up high, Kasoa has a rough-hewn, unfinished look. The newborn city lurches outward from the highway junction in all directions, its roads jammed with traffic. For many experts, this is a problematic feature of much of west Africa’s urbanisation: it is almost entirely unplanned.
Kasoa’s streets are frenzied with jumbles of wooden stalls and incessant trading of all kinds. In the dusty byways beyond the highway, young people were everywhere: hawking sachets of cold water, running after cars to sell mobile phone credits and cheap plastic toys, crying out the prices of sweet, puffy bread or plantain chips from beneath beach umbrellas on street corners.
Most noticeable of all were the schoolchildren walking the streets in their uniforms and backpacks. By 2050, about 40% of all the people under 18 in the world will be African, a proportion that will reach half by century’s end. On the streets of Kasoa, statistics like these come to life. Everywhere there were billboards for daycare centres, kindergartens and “international schools”. The only real competition for school ads came from church ads, which offer promises of success in this world as much as in the next.
Most of the people who fill the streets of places like Kasoa are recent arrivals from the countryside, and live in ramshackle cinderblock dwellings. Julius Ackatiah, a 55-year-old, recently set himself up in business here after many years in Italy, where he had already realised the African dream of emigration, legally acquiring a new nationality in a rich European country. I met him as he peered out from the unfussy sidestreet storefront where he sells secondhand housewares he has shipped from Italy.
Why had he chosen Kasoa, I asked him? Accra has recently become overbuilt and too expensive, Ackatiah said, but Kasoa was on the rise. “There are lots of people here, and they are trying to set up new homes for themselves and make new lives in this town. That makes for good business.” As Ackatiah spoke on the stairs of his shop, he was engulfed by his used-goods stock in trade: cheap plastic chairs, living room couches and tables, computer monitors and household appliances, small and large, from refrigerators and microwaves to laundry irons.
One of the biggest challenges for Africa’s emerging megaregions remains its weak transport networks. In 2018, more than 40 nations agreed to create the African Continental Free Trade Area, an arrangement that economists say could boost African GDP by $450bn by 2035, mostly thanks to increased intra-African commerce. Since then, another 10 countries have joined, including Nigeria, making for a truly continent-wide agreement. “At its crux, outside the World Trade Organization, it is the biggest region of free trade in the world,” said Astrid Haas, a Ugandan independent economist based in Kampala. “What it is intended to do is unlock the benefits on the continental scale for African countries to be able to trade with each other; to eliminate both tariff and non-tariff barriers.”
But realising its full potential will require much more intense cooperation between neighbours, and especially on improving physical infrastructure. Algiers and Cairo remain the only African cities with underground commuter lines. (In recent years, inspired citizen designers have carefully sketched out potential subway networks for cities such as Kigali and Port Harcourt, but these remain hopeful ideas for now.) Abidjan and Lagos are building surface light urban rail systems, but both are small-scale and behind schedule. Meanwhile, the lack of decent roads continues to hold this region back. The four-lane highway between Accra and Kasoa aside, almost the entire 600-mile stretch of coast consists of an undivided two-lane road that passes slowly through small towns and villages. Drivers sometimes find themselves having to dodge daring pedestrians and errant animals.
Then there are the predatory police and soldiers who stop drivers in order to extort money under the pretext of traffic safety checks or the fight against crime. Last summer, on the outskirts of Takoradi, I was waved down by a portly, peanut-chewing police officer who asked, as if it was the most normal thing in the world: “What have you brought for me?” West African travellers face holdups like this, smiling or not, on a daily basis. On a trip in Ghana in the 90s, when I travelled 340 miles from the northern town of Bolgatanga to the central city of Kumasi, I counted 72 roadblocks. If anything, international borders in the region have long been even worse hotspots for this kind of predation.
Yet there is some reason for optimism. In May, the African Development Bank announced it had raised $15.6bn to fund the construction of a new coastal highway from Lagos to Abidjan. “We are talking about something like the road between Baltimore and New York – a toll road,” said Lydie Ehouman, a transportation economist at the bank, who told me the target for completion of the highway, which will be four to six lanes wide throughout, is 2026. “It will be free-flowing, with a chip in your licence plate so you don’t need to stop at toll gates. It will be a modern highway.” Economists at the African Development Bank argue that the West African Highway, as the new road will be called, will increase cross-border trade among the participating countries by 36%.
“If people are confident in the availability of reliable, rapid transportation, other things will begin to change dramatically, too,” said Hoornweg, the Ontario Tech professor. “Property values will rise sharply along the major transportation axes, and that will encourage people to build upward, with highrises, rather than building out with more and more sprawl. The cities will also become much more efficient and environmentally friendly, and that makes their development more sustainable.”
On the ground today, a vision like this isn’t so easily conjured. It’s true that in Lagos a collection of impressive modern highrises is slowly taking shape. And in downtown Accra, a dazzling new real estate scheme – high-end apartment towers, office buildings, fancy shopping plazas, luxury hotels – is planned for the waterfront. But such projects are catering to the needs of the already wealthy, and not to the growing millions of people in the region who will soon urgently need housing. Here, the contrast with China, where huge clusters of residential high-rises ring every large city, could not be more striking. Rather than avatars of the future, in fact, the easiest thing to conclude from projects like these is that the region’s governments are setting their sights far too low to address the sweeping demographic and social changes on their way. This may even be true about the coastal highway system.
“The best thing that could happen to west Africa would be if someone could convince these countries to seriously consider the experience of Asia,” said Alain Bertaud, a senior fellow at the Marron Institute at New York University. As a former World Bank official who specialises in urbanisation, Bertaud advised China about developing one of the world’s most successful megaregions, in the Pearl River delta. “Density itself does not create prosperity,” Bertaud told me. “You will have to have lots more transportation, including new rail lines, new roads that link the coastal highway to the hinterlands and to small cities, where the cheaper land is.” He pointed out that this requires a lot of building across national borders, which is not easy in any part of the world. “In India, we have seen that even building a corridor that crosses several states within the same country is difficult. In Africa they will need much better coordination.”
Haas, the Ugandan economist, agreed. “Africa faces a need for $20-25 billion annually in infrastructure investment, plus $20bn more each year for housing. Trying to convey the scale here is very hard. We are talking about ballooning numbers, and people need to be shocked into action.”
Toward the end of my trip, I took a three-hour drive from Accra to the border with Togo. As we drove, Accra soon gave way to a grimy industrial zone that stretched for miles. From here all the way to the border, about 120 miles, the landscape was filled with peri-urban sprawl, its most distinctive feature being the ubiquitous roadside schools where children played sports or milled about.
At the border, as soon as I climbed out of my car I was surrounded by touts eager to sell me taxi rides, exchange currency for me or help expedite my visa and vaccination checks. I proceeded alone, expecting complications, but was pleasantly surprised at how straightforward the procedures were on both sides of the border. My first question to the driver I hired on the Togolese side was how far it was to the capital, Lomé. He laughed. “You’re already in Lomé,” he said. “In 15 minutes, you will be at your hotel.”
The next day, a Sunday, I drove 30 minutes east from Lomé to a small town with Royce Wells, a 30-year-old American IT professional who wanted to inspect the progress on a beachside house he is building. Togo is an unusually narrow country – wedged between Ghana and Benin, it runs about 430 miles north to south, but has only 31 miles of coastline. For this reason, local elites and foreign investors alike have long dreamed of building it into a kind of entrepot trading state that profits from various kinds of arbitrage, from sharp currency fluctuations in Nigeria and Ghana to varying levels of corruption and political risk among its neighbours.
Togo maintains a democratic facade through regular elections, but has been tightly controlled by one family since 1963. In contrast to Nigeria, though, the electricity works, the internet is fast, and everyday life is not plagued by insecurity. With its commercial future in mind, Togo has built a port with capacity much larger than its domestic needs, and also produces cement, steel and other industrial and consumer goods for its larger neighbours. On this basis, Wells sees the country as a good bet, and hopes to make money building hotels there. “The places that learn how to create the right tax incentives and legal protections [for investors] will basically be able to arbitrage on Lagos and its dysfunction,” he told me.
Others are much more sceptical that this vision will ever be realised. After all, it relies on canny decision-making at the top of government. Bright Simons, a prominent Ghanaian political analyst and entrepreneur, called this five-nation megaregion “one of the most administratively broken landscapes on the planet”. Its governments are “unbelievably un-strategic”, he said. “I am always puzzled by the enthusiasm of elites for creating chambers of commerce with Mexico, or some other distant country, rather than with their own neighbours.”
Here, the needs of west Africa’s booming population collide with the stubborn realities of the nation state, and specifically with contrasting colonial histories. Ivory Coast, Benin and Togo are former French colonies, and Nigeria and Ghana were colonised by Britain. This has left different official languages in place, whether English or French, as well as a currency in the French-speaking states, the CFA franc, that is a relic of colonisation – it was once tied to the French franc and is now attached to the euro. Perhaps the most important imperial legacy, though, is the insular national elites who, because of colonial history and the near-checkerboard way the countries alternate between English and French, pay scarce heed to each other. A Nigerian I met in Accra, for example, told me: “It wasn’t until I started spending time in Ghana recently that I realised Ghana isn’t our neighbour. Benin sits next to us, followed by Togo.”
Cotonou, the economic capital of Benin (separate from but very close to its national capital, Porto-Novo), lies 20 miles from the border of Nigeria, and 76 miles from Lagos, but there is no immediate sense of the behemoth next door. The city of 700,000 (on its way to 5 million by 2100) clusters around a small and tidy administrative centre, complete with a modernist presidential palace built largely in glass, whose large size belies the diminutive nature of Benin itself, the corridor’s second-smallest state. With its low-rise buildings and heavy scooter traffic, much of Cotonou feels scarcely different from a big town or village. Whether Benin likes it or not, Lagos’s accelerating expansion seems destined to one day swamp this place.
When I asked a longtime acquaintance, a successful businessman from Benin, whether people in his country, including its leaders, sustain close relations with Nigeria, the answer was no. “The elite here still flatters itself with talk about being the Latin Quarter of the region, due to our French chauvinism,” he said, referring to the pre-independence era when France made Benin a regional centre of colonial education. “Our leaders are very poor at thinking ahead … If you tell the president he has nice shoes, he’ll be swimming in happiness. With Nigeria next door, what we should have done long ago is make English a compulsory second language in school, but no one has ever thought of that.”
This kind of pessimism, built upon a scornful assessment of governance at the national level in west Africa, is widespread. “We are going to need to have a functioning Ghanaian state, functioning states in Benin and Togo, and at least a minimally functional Nigerian government all at the same time in order to make this hugely urbanised future livable,” said E Gyimah-Boadi, the 70-year-old co-founder and former CEO of the Ghana Center for Democratic Development, a thinktank.
“Part of me wants to believe that the youth of west Africa can be their own saviours, and that it is not because of the failures of my generation that they are necessarily doomed. The nation state has been a huge curse. It worked very well for some of us, but we have left very little behind for the young. Basically, we have cheated them.”
Guinea City?
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
@ The Wild West: It might be just me but on this Africa thread I only seem to hear negative/politically controversial things. Where's the general talk on West African culture, society ect?
There's a lot of local news outlets, as well as allAfrica.com
A coup attempt in Gambia has been foiled. Details are unclear over who was organizing the coup, however.
Organized Canine Bureau Special Agent
https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2023/01/al-qaedas-jnim-pushes-closer-to-malian-capital.php
There’s been an attack close to Bamako by JNIM fighters in Mali.
"Exit muna si Polgas. Ang kailangan dito ay si Dobermaxx!"
News from Nigeria in the wake of the recent elections. APC candidate Bola Tinubu, the former governor of Lagos, has been declared the winner. Tinubu's party is also the party of current president Muhammadu Buhari, who some probably know for being a military dictator back in the 80's and for his spat with Twitter that resulted in the site being blocked for several months. Buhari had supported Tinubu's candidacy.
However, the opposition parties have called for a new vote in light of allegations of voter intimidation and a claimed lack of transparency. There have been cases of violence against voters and polling stations opening late. The current opposition parties are the conservative PDP (their candidate being Atiku Abubakar) and the leftist Labour Party (their candidate being Peter Obi). Obi in particular has grown a massive following, transforming the Labour Party into a sizable opponent to the PDP and APC (who've dominated Nigerian politics since the restoration of democracy in 1999) and appealing to many youths in the country. He even won bigtime in Lagos despite Tinubu's power there.
So, in essence, there's a LOT of back-and-forth going on about the legitimacy of the new elections and they're escalating into protests.
This was the first election in which I'd voted. I just feel depressed about the whole thing. Just moving around to get to out polling unit was a difficult task and now it feels like it was all for nothing.
Edited by windleopard on Mar 1st 2023 at 5:10:03 PM
Another article on the Nigerian elections. The European Union is even criticizing their conduct. Despite how many people were registered to vote, voter turnout is recorded as 26%. This could be due to the various issues with voting in the first place and attempts at suppression, but it could also be partly due to disillusion with the government.
The other is the long lines to get a voting card.
AP: Security concerns, lack of support stall Africa’s Green Wall.
There have been some modest gains for the project, which plans to build an 8000-kilometer (4970-mile) long forest through 11 nations across the width of Africa to hold back the ever-growing Sahara Desert and fend off climate change impacts, but many involved with the plan are calling for renewed momentum to combat both insecurity and environmental decline.
Just 4 million hectares (9.9 million acres) of land has been afforested since work on the Green Wall began 15 years ago — a mere 4% of the program’s ultimate goal.
Adama Doulkom, the coordinator for the Great Green Wall for the Sahara and the Sahel Initiative in Burkina Faso, said political instability and security issues
are significantly stalling progress in nearly 4,000 villages across the country.
“Terrorist attacks in the affected regions have forced populations to disperse. This limits people’s movements, making it hard for us to directly monitor field actions which could lead to difficulty in creating improvements in certain areas,” Doulkom said.
In the last three years Burkinabe’s Sahel, north and east regions have become inaccessible. Much of the Sahelian region designated for the Green Wall is rife with security issues, with efforts in Sudan, Ethiopia, Mali, Chad, Niger and Nigeria all impacted.
The United Nation’s desertification agency said the plan has several additional challenges to overcome, such as lukewarm high-level political support, weak organizational structures, insufficient coordination and financing, and not enough consideration in national environmental priorities.
The Great Green Wall featured prominently at the U.N. agency’s two-week summit in Abidjan in Ivory Coast, which wrapped up Friday. Desertification,
which has severe impacts on food production and security, is exacerbated by climate change and agricultural activity.
First proposed in 2005, the program aims to plant a forest all the way from Senegal on the Atlantic Ocean in the west to Eritrea, Ethiopia and Djibouti in the east. It’s hoped the initiative will create millions of green jobs in rural Africa, reduce levels of climate-related migration in the region and capture hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Several countries have struggled to keep up with the demands of the project, with Mali, Nigeria, Djibouti and Mauritania in particular lagging behind.
The U.N. desertification agency says up to 45% of Africa’s land is impacted by desertification, making it more vulnerable than any other continent. The agency’s director, Ibrahim Thiaw, believes that can have multiple negative effects on surrounding communities, including security concerns.
A report released Sunday by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute also noted the link between environmental degradation and conflict. “In the Sahel, social tensions combined with inadequate governance and environmental decline to produce a bigger security risk,” it said.
“By restoring land, you reduce conflicts and irregular migration. There is a link between land restoration and irregular migration,” said Ibrahim Thiaw. “Land restoration is a no-regrets option in that any effort to recover soil health, replenish natural capital and restore land health will deliver benefits that far exceed the costs.”
“What we are calling for now is action to accelerate the implementation of such a program to make sure that farmers, pastoralists, local communities and women are all associated with it,” he added.
Despite a multitude of setbacks, those involved in the project remain optimistic. The coordinator of the Great Green Wall, Elvis Tangem, told the Associated Press that while conflict has slowed down the progress of the project, it has also opened up newer opportunities.
“It started as an environmental project but the dynamics of the region have made us look beyond the ecological aspects of the project and to embrace direct community concerns such as conflict resolution, peace building, youth development, women empowerment and rural development especially among pastoralists and farming communities,” he said.
Some progress has been made in recent years in the east of the continent, according the the program’s coordination office in Addis Ababa.
Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Sudan have all expanded their efforts, with Ethiopia producing 5.5 billion seedlings leading to thousands of hectares of restored land as well as an uptick in job creation. Efforts in Eritrea and Sudan have also resulted in nearly 140,000 hectares (346,000 acres) of afforestation.
Niger is also hailed for making considerable progress.
“In terms of measurable restoration milestones on the ground, Niger can be said to be far ahead of most of the countries with significant citizen awareness and contributing reforestation activities at all levels,” said Tabi Joda, a Great Green Wall ambassador. “More communities are embracing the initiative and taking the lead through their own community led solutions.”
Joda, who heads up youth mobilization for the project, noted that the scheme has seen strong governmental support in Senegal and Nigeria.
Between $36 and $43 billion are needed to realize the Green Wall by 2030, according to estimates by the World Resources Institute. The African Development Bank pledged approximately $6.5 billion for the wall by 2025 during the U.N.’s climate conference in November last year following an effort led by France in early 2021 which committed $14.5 billion towards the project, falling significantly short of the WRI’s estimate.
The U.N. desertification agency says the current land restoration pace must be ramped up to an average of 8.2 million hectares (20 million acres) per year if the project is to achieve its self-imposed goal of 100 million hectares (247 million acres) restored by 2030.
“Investments must be intentional to deliver opportunities that create the right dose of green jobs needed by the critical mass of youths and communities vulnerable to irregular migration and violence due to competition over scarce resources caused by land degradation,” Tabi Joda said.