A perceptive 2015

One afternoon last May, I took this picture from the veranda of the charming hotel I was staying in Joal-Fadiouth, a few hour’s south of my former home, Dakar.

Looking at it on my laptop a few weeks later I was astonished. Surely, those trees were not there?

Evidently, they were. My memory was playing tricks or – more probably – I had not been watching properly. I toyed with the idea of calling the image “The Phantom Forest” but that wold be unjust to the baobab trees who have been there for centuries. (Not that they’d care much…)

And now I am in Ouagadougou, where a lot has been happening recently as the rest of the world was busing looking elsewhere – or couldn’t be bothered to look – or was in fact watching things but chose to ignore what was happening in front of its nose.

Reality, like those trees, does not care. My job is in essence to look, to look again, to look harder and then ask the inevitable question: ‘Have I missed anything?’

The answer is equally inevitable: ‘Yes, you most probably have.’

Here’s to a perceptive 2015.

Very Important Visitors

There’s hardly a bigger headache than heads of state and government descending on a city for a summit. In 1997, Amsterdam was sealed off during an EU Conference that just had to be held in the heart of the old town. February 2008, Monrovia went into lockdown during the few hours George W. Bush came to see his friend Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, ruining my planned interview with the Liberian head of state in the process. And now we have Dakar, suffering under the presence of some six dozen Great&Good who all speak French. Yes, it’s La Francophonie, held in a brand new conference centre built by a Turkish firm for the “bagatelle”, as the French so deliciously call it, of €$75m. Truth be told: the jamboree has made my two last full days in Dakar extremely annoying.

Because the Great&Good That Speak French arrive at the airport, then take the Autoroute and the Toll Road to the conference location: Diamniadio, 30 kilometres outside Dakar. This formerly quiet, sleepy village where this nation’s great Northern and Central/Eastern routes meet is now part of a vast new project: a brand new urban development close to the new international airport that will probably open sometime during 2016.

Back to the Transport of the Great&Good. For several days, from 6am to 11pm, the Dakarois are offered the irritating soundtrack of wailing sirens and the endless whistleblowing of gendarmes preventing people from going about their normal routine of crossing the road where and when they please. Feeling on the street, predictably: ‘Francophonie? Horse manure.’ Yep. The sooner you all *BEEP* off back to where you came from, the better. And do hold your next EU, UN, Commonwealth, Francophone, Whichever conference in a remote National Park somewhere with very few people. You’ll be less of a nuisance there.

Back to the Diamniadio Jamboree and here’s an  excellent observation from a Senegalese commentator: is it not remarkable how little attention has been paid to – by far! – the single most important event in West Africa this year: the revolution in Burkina Faso. Even with Burkina’s  interim president Michel Kafando present among them, it was only the French leader Hollande who named the event. Hollande “forgot” to mention, though, that in October he had, de facto, offered the vacant job of Head of La Francophonie to the now deposed “pompier-pyromane” Blaise Compaoré…

With jihadists in its front yard and Dakar an open international space, security is a major concern for the Senegalese authorities. But it has clearly gone completely overboard by banning an anti-Francophonie Summit, a measure that was – rightly – condemned as anti-democratic. The government of president Macky Sall demonstrates regularly that it has a tenuous relationship with the concepts of democracy, freedom of assembly and freedom of speech. Still, in fairness, Senegal remains miles away from that hotbed of media and government-fed paranoia, that mortal enemy of personal Space and Liberty as it ogles the private lives of citizens and visitors alike, that surveillance-obsessed, control-addicted nation that harvests personal data on an industrial scale. I am, of course, referring to the United States; with the CCTV states in northeastern Europe, France included, not far behind.

Inevitable Islam

Bamako. It’s 3:30am and someone has been singing verses from the Koran non-stop for well over an hour. Not very loud but very persistent. He must be keeping hundreds awake at this hour but clearly no-one is going to tell him to be quiet.

Every afternoon the reception area in the court of the Maison de la Presse in Conakry turns into a miniature mosque. When I witnessed it for the first time I will freely admit to feeling upset. More precisely: my secular, social democratic and most of all my journalistic sensibilities were upset: why bring evidence-free religion into a building that supposedly celebrates evidence-based reporting? I was told that it was not a problem.

Dakar. The city centre goes into shutdown. Large groups of people, chain of 99 prayer beads in hand, stroll through the narrow streets and settle in any place where there is still space. The Plateau becomes one large open air prayer session for the duration of the Friday afternoon prayer, the most important one of the week.

What is going on ?

Central Ouagadougou with the old Great Mosque

The rise of Islam in this part of the continent is neither extraordinary nor inexplicable. After Independence, formerly French territories like Mali, Senegal, Burkina Faso and Niger were run by political elites that singularly failed their people. No better place to go to than, once again, that epic novel by Ahmadou Kourouma, En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages, a novel I want to see on every Global Top Ten Must Read list. As Kouroumah shows, the political elites combined the rhetoric of modern nationalism and democracy with styles of leadership that had roots in local traditions. But the people at large did not see a clever hybrid or a government by the people for the people. They saw kleptocrats who served themselves and their families and in-laws, their friends, and the interests of the former colonial power, especially France. Everybody else came dead last.

Meanwhile, in came another belief, carried along by a large group of mostly Western individuals. In tandem with sections of that already discredited political elite, this imported gospel was called:

Development.

Nobody was really sure what in Heaven’s name this meant, not least because the high priests (at first) and high priestesses (later and in larger numbers) kept changing the definition every other year. First, development was to come through big, state-coordinated plans. Then culture had to be promoted and women too – not at all a contradiction in most of West Africa. Then the state had to be dismantled and decentralised while corruption had to be fought and good governance promoted. For a while, building infrastructure would bring development but then environmental degradation had to be halted. And security had to be promoted, in countries where the army had taken over power (often with widespread popular approval) but then had been allowed to turn into undisciplined racketeering machines. Exceptions duly noted.

And the people? The saw armies of Four Wheel Drives come and go, bedecked with an increasingly bewildering array of logos and labels. And they stayed poor.

Bamako, Tour d’Afrique, from taxi

I am writing this from Mali, a country that has had more than its unfair share of these multiplying and often contradictory development fads rammed down its throat. The development faith gained its disproportionate influence because of the money that was attached to it, which the elites, correctly, identified as another resource to be exploited. And the fads it brought along across the decades were always, always, always the result of development in donor countries.

As a result, Mali is the prefect example of a development state where development rhetoric was on everyone’s lips. A country where foreign-organised workshops, notoriously, passed for news items on state television. But the rhetoric is losing all of its relevance. Fast. ‘I live less than an hour away from Bamako and my village has no electricity, no safe drinking water and not even one decent primary school. ‘ It is these and other statements (including the absolutely dismal performance of the education sector in spite of  Millennium Goals rhetoric) that should compel all of us to come clean and give the development experiment in Mali and elsewhere its proper name.

An abject, catastrophic failure.

New mosque. Under construction but already in use. Ouagadougou.

The people, still poor, have already done so. They are turning elsewhere, to another imported religion but one that arguably has older and deeper roots. Islam does not promise material gain through “development”. In fact, it does not promise development at all. Neither does it change priorities every two years. Islam has a number of immutable basic tenets that, like the five calls to prayer, can act as anchors in peoples’ lives. It also has a good number of very practical rules that people can live by; solidarity is one of them, no matter how modest one’s means. In short, if offers an outlook on life that is a much closer to the majority’s lived experience than any kind of rhetoric emanating from air-conditioned offices and cars. The people do not own aircons; they own cheap ventilators.

The Sufi tradition predominates here and revulsion at the vandal hordes that invaded northern Mali and the ugly killing sprees by Boko Haram is virtually universal. This is not the kind of Islam that compels people to go and fight in Syria or Iraq, with a few exceptions here and there. What it does do, is offer refuge. The political elites have failed, the security details steal and everyone sees the Development Gospel for the scam it is.

Gorée

Alright I (still) live in Dakar, have run this blog on and off for almost five years and I have never written about Gorée. Correct? Correct. And after my visit yesterday (which reconfirmed my premonitions) I can tell you that the main reason for not going there is…that in spite of all its evident picturesqueness…

…I can’t stand the place.

It begins even before you get onto the boat (“la chaloupe,” as it is charmingly called) that takes you there. Quite apart from paying a fairly extortionate rate to get aboard you also have to begin dealing with people who offer their services as Guides. All fine and good but wait until I get onto the island, OK? It’s a bit like the incessant taxi horns: if I need you I’ll let you know. I don’t need this in-your-face service offering. On the boat, you will also be accosted by very nice ladies who are being very nice to you because they want to sell you something. All invariably have a boutique that you absolutely must visit or a restaurant where you must come and eat.

From a boutique yard. Spot the hawks…

The arrival is pretty. Port. Small beach. And a quay that has not been repaired in over 50 years to make a wild guess. By contrast, the new departure building that houses all maritime services out of Dakar is a massive step forward from the shack where we used to be herded into prior to departure.

Stepping off the quay you are herded…towards the Tourism Office where you are made to pay about one dollar for the privilege of visiting the island. Fair enough, but I personally would like to be informed of this before I step on the boat. A sign at the ticket office, say. Fumbling for the cash you are approached by people who offer their services as Official Guide, once you have stepped away from the payment office. Walking down the first street past the office the line changes to “It’s interesting with a Guide.”

No doubt. But it rather grates that the assumption first of all is that I am French. And second that I know nothing about the island and its Portuguese – Dutch – British – French – Senegalese history. And third that I have loads of cash. All these are dead wrong but in Gorée, you are pushed back in the role of dumb, money-laden French tourist. Of which there are loads, assuredly. However, one might assume that Gorée has made an effort to distinguish between those and others. Otherwise, the suspicion lingers that this country does not take its premier tourist destination terribly seriously.

Sometimes I do get a pic right!

There are museums. They range from underwhelming (Maritime) to excellent (History) and a special place must of course be reserved for the House of Slaves, that stands as a monument for this crime against humanity, of which Saint Louis, not Gorée, was the principal Senegalese focal point. I personally do not think it necessary to inflate the figure of slaves that passed through Gorée to a height that exceeds the entire transatlantic trade to bring home the sheer despairing humiliation of it all. Let the dungeons and the cells and the Door of No Return speak for themselves. They do so, eloquently.

Dakar-Plateau, as seen from Gorée

The trip to the Castle at the top of the island is a gauntlet run through an open air consumer gallery with overpriced restaurants and equally overpriced and not terribly interesting art, a few exceptions notwithstanding. Instead of enjoying the scene, you hurry through. One moment’s hesitation and it’s: ‘Looking for something? Come here.’ Being surrounded by folks who follow, hawk-like, your every move does not make me want to come back.

Gorée is a world class tourist destination based on its importance for human history. It could also be a welcome haven away from the nervous bustle of the city opposite. Instead, it exudes the atmosphere that everything revolves around money. My money. And weirdly enough, I can’t shake that unpleasant feeling.

A dignified Gorée is built up around the historical axis that links the Castle, via the House of Slaves and the excellent Gorée Institute to the Fort that is home to the History Museum. The rest are add-ons, non-essential consumer items. It’s nice to be able to eat, nice to be able to have a drink, nice to even spend a night here but not vital in a place that is one plunge away from a major West African metropolis. As for the shops and the guides: nobody needs this overkill. Prioritise the local Goréens – after all they need to make a living -, ensure that everyone understands that ‘No, sorry, not interested,’ means just that…and leave me alone until I get there. Whenever that may be. Until then:

That’s it, folks – goodbye!

Hero

What do Charles Taylor, Robert Mugabe, Laurent Gbagbo and Thabo Mbeki have in common? Apart from the fact that all have been presidents (one still is and will be until he dies) and all have to a greater or lesser extent autocratic tendencies and three out of four have proved to be prone to violence. Well? Here it is: they all hate The West and the Evil People who populate it although some (Mbeki) are better at hiding it than others (his northern neighbour). And because they all hate that monstrous entity that spreads disease, pestilence, death, destruction and bad entertainment around the world wherever it puts its jackboot, they all have earned the adoring admiration of the magazine I used to write for and from time to time write about: New African, NA for short.

Once upon a time the magazine sailed a journalistic course with regards to Côte d’Ivoire but then I wrote a letter to the editor (never published) reminding him that since Laurent Gbagbo employed exactly the same anti Western rhetoric as its other heroes (if not similar repressive methods like Mugabe) they should support him to the hilt. I remain, until this very day, deeply disappointed that I have never been given credit for the swift change in editorial line that NA performed in order to chime with the magazine’s central narrative: The West is plotting in more than a thousand ways to keep the Black Man Down.

It did obediently reproduce a piece about the Ivorian crisis penned by former South African president Thabo Mbeki, the contents of which came straight from the Public Relations Department of the Front Populaire Ivoirien, Gbagbo’s very own ZANU-PF. To this day, the FPI remains firmly convinced that its leader won the elections and that France’s former ADHD president Sarkozy put Ouattara on the throne with United Nations complicity. And that’s another thing that all these have in common with NA’s central narrative, which is a seductive mix of perpetual victimhood based on kernels of truth without any self-reflection. It produces a deeply disempowering political agenda.

The reason I am writing all this is that I have discovered that NA has added a new hero to its expanding Heroes’ Pantheon. His name? His Excellency, Sheikh Professor Alhaji Doctor Jahya Abdel Aziz Jemus Junkug Jammeh, President of the Republic of The Gambia! He ticks all the right boxes. Came to power in a coup in 1994 and has since developed the mindset that running his country, into the ground as it happens, is his inalienable birthright. He has turned the country into his private property and a police state. Also a haven for money laundering and arms smuggling. And sex tourism for middle-aged women from the UK, Netherlands, Germany and elsewhere. Business Is Booming.

Jammeh’s greatest claim to fame dates back to April 2000, when he ordered the army to open fire on unarmed schoolchildren on a demonstration, while exclaiming his most memorable quote: shoot the bastards. He had a few more executed in 2012 as his jails were facing a capacity problem. Now that’s what I call efficiency. He also supports at least one of the factions that is causing frequent havoc across the border in Senegal’s Casamance Province, effectively holding the government in Dakar hostage: if you allow too much Gambian dissidence on your territory, all hell will break loose in your beloved Casamance. So far, it has worked like a charm.

 

But why has His Excellency etc etc etc earned himself the adoring admiration of New African magazine? Because he hates The West and the Evil People in it. He has become worried about the fact that The West takes a disproportionately large part of Africa’s wealth. This Must Change. He advocates a program of redistribution that he may, one day, want to apply in his own country. Apparently, The Gambia is sitting on oil and His Excellency etc etc has discovered…the Gambian People. To whom the oil belongs. Interesting thought. He has made other striking revelations in the past, such as not needing doctors to cure AIDS; he can do that himself. (I seem to remember Thabo Mbeki had a rather tenuous relationship with the scientific explanation of the disorder…) His Excellency etc etc also likes to employ unregistered armies, like Charles Taylor, to further his objectives. As far as anyone can see he only has one, the same as Mugabe: staying in power until he dies. He has more things in common with the Dear Leader in Harare: he recently left The Commonwealth because it is colonialist and the two are also united in their intense homophobia. ‘Worse than pigs and dogs,’ in Mugabeland; ‘vermin’, in Jammehland.  Both were upstaged recently by Uganda’s gay-hating president Yoweri Museveni, whom NA dislikes intensely because he is deemed a “stooge of the West” but who knows, things may change…

So NA went to The Gambia and did a MAC (Mutual Adoration Chat), went on to publish a few quotes on oil and a letter castigating someone who had the gall to criticise this hero of the fight against colonialism, slavery, exploitation, greed and racism, which as you know are the only relevant hallmarks of The West and its Evil People. I, for one, am pleased to see His Excellency Sheikh Professor Alhaji Doctor Jahya Abdel Aziz Jemus Junkug Jammeh, President of the Republic of The Gambia, curer of AIDS, swift dispatcher of school children, brave protagonist of proxy conflict, expert emptier of prisons and champion of the downtrodden included in NA’s Heroes’ Pantheon. Maybe he could accompany the editor on one of his frequent trips to a certain Heroes’ Acre in the Zimbabwean capital where some heroes are notable for their absence. Not that this should detain this new beautiful pair as they gushingly report from Paradise On Earth.

A changing city

This is what is left of the fruit stall, the spring roll stall, the sandwich stall, the coffee stall and a whole lot of other outlets that were razed to the ground in February this year. This is now the corner of my street.

The razing to the ground was met with almost universal approval. You will be hard-pressed to find anyone disagreeing with this action. In fact you will hear one dissenting voice: mine. And my simple verdict after four months is this:

REMOVING THESE STALLS AND KIOSKS HAS BEEN AN ACT OF MONUMENTAL STUPIDITY.

Quite apart from the fact that the vendors on my street corner actually were in nobody’s way, paid taxes into the coffers of their local municipality – call that a kind of officially sanctioned protection racket if you will – they also brought another valuable quality to the street.

A modicum of security.

It was busy; too many people around to get to up all manner of mischief. Mischief there was but we know that in busy market places punishment can be harsh, public and immediate.

A colleague of mine was recently at the mythical Sandaga Market in downtown Dakar. ‘There’s nothing left,’ he reported, ‘it’s like a Sunday out there.’ So what has happened to everyone working there? Read on.

***

If you find that vendors are clogging up your streets, there are intelligent ways of going about regulating this – and stupid ways. Knocking them down is the stupid way. Monumentally so. I have no evidence that the intelligent way has been tried but this would involve…

One: building an alternative before you start knocking stuff down (and yes, you can do that with the World Bank money that was reportedly available for this operation)

Two: making a distinction between those who really are blocking roads, pavements et cetera – and those who aren’t

Three: engaging with the vendors to be affected and point out the alternatives and only then: move the recalcitrant elements out by force.

Like most local authorities the world over, they got it backwards.

And the upshot of this? Permanent unemployment for tens of thousand of people, more begging, less economic activity – or more economic activity but of the wrong kind. I cannot be the only one who is noticing a link between the authorities creating mass-unemployment and insecurity and the crime wave that is hitting my neighbourhood like never before. My own burglary to begin with. But I am far from being the only one. In practical day-to-day terms…

I am among an increasingly large group of professionals who walk around with all my valuables because I cannot leave them at home.

It is now a common occurrence that you get attacked by some youth on a scooter…within hours of you arriving here. In Yoff!

Add to this another ticking time bomb. The little boys who were – and are – being mercilessly exploited by so-called marabouts (condoned if not actively encouraged by the previous government), well, guess what? They grow up. They have no skills, have learned nothing and are already becoming noticeably more aggressive.

In short: street gangs in the making. This government made noises about banning child begging and then climbed down. I cannot prove this but it is my hunch that the president was leaned upon by folks high up the religious hierarchy to back off.

So I am joining a crowd that is not waiting for the next wave of excrement to hit the fan. A growing group that is expressing a desire to leave. Not necessarily the country – but this town?

Nope. Something is going dreadfully wrong here.

The Monument – a short sequel

Three years ago this very day, God received many earthly guests for the official dedication of the Monument erected to the eternal Glory of Himself and his Family. I wrote a piece about it, which a lot of you rather liked.

Today, as Senegal celebrates its 53^rd birthday, it’s a good occasion to revisit the story of the Monument for the African Renaissance, designed to portray, according to God’s own words, an Africa “that emerges from obscurantism, prejudice and other ills.” It always takes religion, no matter which one, to create a gap as wide as the Pacific between words and actions.

Senegal is trying to recover from God’s reign and the Monument remains a powerful symbol of everything that was wrong with it. There is, for instance, the matter of who paid for this? And how much? The financial construction was rather…obscure and involved the sale of prime Dakar real estate to the North Korean company Mansudae Overseas that built the monstrosity. We don’t talk any longer about the blight on the horizon of this great city but a poll would in all likelihood reveal a majority in favour of blowing the damn thing up. Allegedly, current president Macky Sall pledged such during his winning campaign. But that might be rumour.

*

So yes, you got that right: in order to build His Monument, God, otherwise known as the former president of Senegal Abdoulaye Wade, an avowed free market politician and a conservative liberal sold a piece of his country to a hereditary kingdom, nominally communist. The details of this deal are currently under investigation by officials of an agency called the General State Inspection.

But there is more news. And as always, anything to do with the Wade era revolves around the only thing that really matters to him, money.

You may remember that Wade had declared himself the intellectual owner of the Monument. Of course. This is, after all, the same man who during his last campaign declared that those who failed to acknowledge His achievements ought to be…struck with blindness. Very merciful, very compassionate.

Now, as the Designer-In-Chief, Wade had declared that 35% of the proceeds would flow into his extraordinarily wide and deep pockets. Except that he was not the D-I-C. And now, current minister for Culture Abdoul Aziz Mbaye has declared that as far as he is concerned, the ex-president will not get a penny. ‘Let him first tell us how he is, by rights, the author,’ the minister declared.

*

How times have changed. Incredibly, God lost an election last year and has, appropriately, retired to Versailles. L’État, c’est Moi, n’est-ce pas? According to newspaper reports he is bored out of his skull. Meanwhile, the communist Kingdom of North Korea is going through an unusually tempestuous phase of its ritual sabre-rattling. Obscurantism had to be forcefully removed from neighbouring Mali and remains defiantly undefeated. And the minister for Tourism, a certain Youssou Ndour, has his work cut out for him because Senegal has fallen off the holiday map.

All of which means: no income from the Monument for Mister Wade. And here’s a pretty merciless cartoonist, who thinks that the man who disfigured Dakar’s horizon forever may well be falling on very hard times indeed…

The minister: ‘Giving you money for a work that belongs to me – no way.’ Street vendor, uncannily looking like a former president: ‘But it’s me the artist! Give me my money!!’

The culture of debate

Caught my eye in the newspaper this morning. ‘Program launched at Senegalese universities.’ The strapline gave the game away: ‘Promotion of the culture of debate among Senegalese youth.’

When you read a line like this, the association is immediate: some NGO or other? Correct! Does it contain the word training somewhere? It does – double bingo!

Law students at the University Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, an institution in the deepest crisis since its establishment, where students go without tuition for months and have even resorted to the extreme act of setting themselves on fire to get their grievances heard, that university, plays host to a team of foreigners (yep – you got that one right too – someone needs a holiday…) that will teach…er…

…Respect For Diversity. Ah, no, not that kind of diversity, that’s for Westerners in their own countries who have been taught to swallow the new gospel hook line and sinker. No: the Senegalese students will be taught the kind of diversity that is no longer taught at universities in the West, and in fact the only diversity that really matters: Diversity Of Opinion.

Tolerance of other peoples’ views will be preached, says the woman who coordinates the program, plus the ability to listen to others and accepting the public verdict in the end. All in the name of good democracy and an Open Society.

Yes, this time it’s George Soros’ outfit teaching those poor hapless Senegalese students – who only last year helped rid the country of a megalomaniac with seriously autocratic tendencies – how to do democracy. Of course, Ms Hawa Ba who coordinates the program in Senegal needs a job, like everyone else working for the Oxfams, the Action Aids, the official aid bureaucracies, the UN bureaucracies and everybody else in this more than US$60bn industry. The pay is good and the perks are nice, for as long as they last. Very few things are as fickle as the priorities of the aid establishment.

But here’s the rub.

If there is one thing the Senegalese excel in, it’s talk. “Wakh rek,” only talk, is a frequent referral not only to the increasingly irrelevant political class but also to the fact that work gets a lot more talked about than actually done. In an extremely rich place like the Netherlands, this has become a national pastime but then the Dutch can afford it – up to a point. They will eventually find out that holding meetings and shifting boxes do not constitute an economy. But that’s their problem.

What we don’t need here is more people who know how to talk; the law students will learn that in college – if the professor can be bothered to show up. What we need are people who know how things are made and done. We need entrepreneurs, like Aissa Dione, people who create factories, as the Nigerian industrialist AlikoDangote is doing.

On the Autoroute, a few metres from my flat: we want to work at Dangote cement.

We need people who can work and ensure that homes stay dry during the next rainy season, people who can fix schools and universities so that they start fulfilling their educational promises, people who can fix the deeply dysfunctional water and electricity systems. And so on. We emphatically do not need any more administrators, bureaucrats or people who can organise workshops and training sessions.

Oh and we need the outdated colonial laws fixed – so that the people who make things happen and create jobs are not obstructed, blocked, harassed, frustrated and thwarted Every Single Step Of The Way.

And listening lessons? Coming from a US-based organisation I find that, well let’s keep this polite, a bit rich. The times I was in the dear old USA I have been awestruck by the depth of the love affair Americans have with their own voices. It’s a place where political debate mainly consists of two people standing with their backs to each other and shouting ‘You’re wrong!!!’ (or worse) at each other. Where the soundbite was invented. And you are coming over here to teach us….wakh rek.

Hey, Open Society, I have a job for you: pulling the other one.

Bread – a (not so) simple tale

It happens sometimes that a friend asks me: is there anything you miss about Holland? And as a matter of fact, there is: brown bread and decent cheese. You can get cheese at fiendishly inflated prices in an upmarket shopping space like the unspeakably dreadful Dakar City; full of folks full of themselves. It is, mercifully, located many miles from were I live.

But OK – cheese is sort of doable. It’s the bread that’s the real story here.

You see, this used to be a French colony. Food-wise, this is not a catastrophe, you add French cuisine to the magnificent Senegalese national thieboudiën (rice, fish, spice, vegetables), and all is well.

Except for breakfast.

Alright, we agree on the coffee. But that is where me and the French part company. Croissants, confiture, you must be joking. And the worst of all: baguettes. Yes, I like them, freshly baked and crisp.

But not everyday.

And this is where I accidentally made a discovery. I went to a small bakery down the road and pointed at something that did not look like a baguette. The young man at the counter asked : ‘But…do you know what that is? It’s mburu duggub. Millet bread.’ ‘It’s not baguette,’ I replied. ‘I want to try this.’

I took it home…

From a small corner in my modest kitchen

…and it turned out to taste a million times better than those wretched…anyway: I don’t want to alienate my French friends too much.

Now, millet is grown in Senegal. Wheat is imported, to the tune of millions of euros, every year. My simple economic mind thinks that here is a golden opportunity to kill three, nope, four birds with one stone.

1. Buy duggub, save a Senegalese farmer who would otherwise close business and come to town.

2. Save huge amounts of money on wheat imports.

3. Create more rural employment and build a healthy section of your very own economy.

4. Improve the quality of breakfast.

Oh and, er, educate the mills that produce flour. I remember a debate in the press here, last year, about this very issue and why the moulins were refusing to process local produce. Technically difficult, they claimed. Even when the bakers, as we speak, are threatening to go on strike because the price of flour has gone up – again.

Technical difficulties? Balls, I’d say. In the words of a famous TV series character: make it so. But only when the consumer wants it. And that’s another bottleneck: the obsession with price. Understandable but in this case, quite wrong. What you spend on better bread, you’ll probably save on the doctor.

***

Same story about shoes. Why buy cheap Chinese stuff when a village called Ngaye, in your very own backyard produces some of the finest shoes anywhere on the planet? Yes, they are more expensive but they last five years instead of three weeks. And why not restore the cloth manufacturing industry, as this entrepreneur wants to do, and serve the market with quality material – made here?

The possibilities are endless. The riddle is why it’s not happening. Consumer habits? Yes. Entrenched interests, especially among traders and importers? Certainly. Outdated (French!) legal frameworks that put massive obstructions in place for anyone who wants to start a business? Part of the picture too. There’s probably more.

A lot of big business started in the proverbial garage. Why not a bakery? The address: La Villageoise, Autoroute de l’Aéroport, Yoff Mbenguene, Dakar. Spread the word.

 

Deadly Geography

Sometimes, reality hits home when you move temporarily away from it. In February, I was covering the first round of Senegal’s presidential elections – out of Dakar.

Coming back from Tambacounda (where I met two excellent rap artists) and Kaolack (where an office belonging to the then ruling party was burnt down) I was looking at the landscape from a bush taxi and thinking: this is all very empty. Sand. Savannah. A few trees. A few homes. And a town or two.

Our taxi took a brand new ring road around the town of Diourbel, 146 kilometres from Dakar. Then we joined the old road to Thiès, which runs next to a railway rack. It was astonishing how fast places were filling up. Sand and savannah were still there but the rhythm of the settlements increased – dramatically.

Long before we got into Thiès, we were driving through what was basically giant sprawl. The final stretch from Thiès itself to Dakar, 65 kilometres, is fast becoming one massive megacity.

Not much later, a story in La Gazette (called Deadly Geography) made the point. It said that more than half of the entire Senegalese electorate was living in three rather small districts: Dakar, Thiès, Diourbel. Tambacounda district, which has far more surface area than those three combined was home to…less than 4% of the country’s electorate.

The strain is obvious. Newspaper Le Populaire reported this week that the National Statistics and Demographic Office had calculated that between 2000 and 2009 rents some parts of Dakar had gone up by almost 40%. Forty per cent! Friends keep telling me to NEVEREVEREVER abandon this apartment I’m renting because I will never get this much value for money again…

Question: where did these eye-watering rent increases take place? Sure, Central Dakar, where the expensive offices are. But also in Guédiawaye and Pikine. That’s where the poorest people in town live! If this is the free market at work, someone’s clearly having a laugh.

The strain is obvious in other ways too. Power cuts at any moment. Water pressure in many parts of town (expect the expensive ones) is now so low that this shower you have in your bathroom is…decoration, basically. Any agglomeration that grows at such breakneck speed cannot possibly expect service provision to keep up.

Yes, we know. Cities continue to grow fast because rural folk look for opportunities not available in the village: money, jobs, and so on. Some succeed, a lot more don’t. Fact is, very few go back. I met the grand total of one on my country trip: Vincent had left behind his dreadful and badly paid job as a night guard and had started farming. He was glad to be out of Dakar. But there are very few like him.

Dakar was home, this week, to a massive jamboree called Africites, in the obscenely expensive King Fahd Palace (formerly the Meridien). Hopefully the mayors from all corners of the globe and the other luminaries caught a glimpse of “the other side of town”, if only to reinforce their firmly held and often voiced conviction that they are firmly in touch with “The People”.

More to come on cities. Making them places where you can lead a decent life rather than just vegetate is arguably the biggest challenge on the planet, although it appears that they’re having a word about this thingy called climate change in another jamboree far from here. Well, not that far actually: you can fly directly from Dakar to nearby Dubai. On Emirates.