It’s business, st*p*d!

James Carville’s house slogan (“It’s the economy, stupid!”) for Bill Clinton’s election campaign never gets old and can be applied in a lot of situations. For instance here, where I will be trying to explain, in ways less flippant than Carville’s great one-liner suggests, why the West’s obsession with ‘jihadism’ in the Sahel is mostly misguided.

There are still buses doing the long trip from the Malian capital Bamako to the major town of Gao in the country’s remote northeast. On that 1,200 kilometres long trip, they will go from a good tarred road into Ségou, to a fairly OK but still tarred road into Sévaré (where there have been several attacks against army bases) and then on to a road hardly worthy of the name past Douentza, Hombori and Gossi and finally into Gao. This report was made three years ago; there is nothing to suggest that the situation has improved.

But buses continue to run the full gauntlet into Gao. How is this possible, on long stretches of virtually non-existent road through areas that are infested with self-defence militias, self-styled jihadist groups and their splinters, khalifate-creating fanatics and bandits with their guns and their roadside bombs? (The category “bandits”, by the way, almost always overlaps all the others.)

Simple: the companies pay. Any business working in areas these gangs control does the same. What we are seeing here is the Sahelian variant of the protection racket. And it has been spreading, along with the armed turbulence that began when Algeria threw its armed ‘jihad’ gangster problem across the fence into Mali in the late 1990s and was then made ten times worse when France, the UK, the USA and NATO plunged Libya into the chaos from which it has never recovered. And even in Algeria it was not entirely over. What was the original business these original ‘jihadis’ were in? Banditry: smuggling contraband and kidnapping Westerners; this last they did safe in the knowledge that the governments of rich white countries pay to have their citizens released. Even the late Hissène Habré, the butcher of Chad, knew this.

Habré gained notoriety in the 1970s as a rebel leader and hostage taker. His hostages were West German and French, whose governments paid good money for the release of their citizens. That did not stop the United States and France from sponsoring Habré all the way to the Chadian presidency, a post he took by force of arms, flown in from the USA by way of Monrovia’s international airport, as former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Chester Crocker explained to me during an interview in Washington. In the eight years (1982 to 1990) that he manhandled his country, Habré arranged for the murder of 40,000 people and the torture of many more, crimes for which he was belatedly convicted in a Dakar court, in 2016. He died in a Dakar hospital, aged 79.

So, hostage taking is an old business, probably as old as running protection rackets. The former were at the origin of the self-styled ‘jihadist’ groups. The latter are – in tandem with theft, extortion, and artisanal gold extraction – at the core of these groups’ business today. Smuggling, meanwhile, has been an absolute constant throughout, from cigarettes to drugs.  One of the earlier leaders of these armed ‘jihad’ gangs, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, was nicknamed Mr Marlboro and you get no extra points for guessing why that was. People smuggling, I understand, is an entirely different branch and has no inherent connection with the violent armed gangs who are busy shutting down the Sahel. Which stands to reason: people smugglers get paid to get people to a destination. They do not set out to kill people; even though they very often fail in their trips across the unforgiving Sahara desert the objective is to get people to their destination alive.

Today, nothing much has changed. Islamic State mines gold in Burkina Faso and Mali, it and other armed gangs set up roadblocks and extort money from the travelling public, raid buses if the companies running them have not paid enough or on time; they steal cattle – a deliberate and deeply destructive act – and still smuggle drugs and contraband.

Their methods for recruiting foot soldiers come straight out of the gangster rulebooks that were used in Liberia and Sierra Leone at the end of the last century: find young, marginalised men with little or no prospects, manipulate them with lies, false promises, ply them with drugs and then tell them what to do: rape, kill, burn, steal, pillage, loot, pilfer, extort. How did West Africa’s jungle soldiers, some as young as 7, refer to these activities? I will tell you because I asked them this question. And their answer was: they considered doing these things their job. The self-styled ‘jihadist’ gangs we see in Mali, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Niger, Libya, Chad, Cameroon and now also in Togo, Benin and Côte d’Ivoire operate in exactly the same way. These are at their very core criminal organisations, working towards the creation of what one general from Mauritania once memorably called “a Boulevard of Crime, from Tripoli to Abidjan…”

Vandalism in Timbuktu, 2013

But what about the religion then? Because none of what you have read so far sounds terribly religious. Correct: it does not sound religious because it isn’t. But there are most definitely religious zealots in the ranks of these violent criminal gangs and some, like the notorious Amadou Koufa in Central Mali may even be a bona fide religious warlord. This is logical: using Islam as a recruitment tool resonates with folks who are, in the majority, deeply religious. Often the only ‘education’ young kids can afford is going to the Koran school, where they learn to recite the entire Holy Book back to front and nothing else. They are often sent onto the streets of all the main cities to beg for money, to be delivered to their Koran teacher. Some education…

You see? This is the mechanism Taylor used, with a new twist. Allah does not give you food; you must work for it. And so, when I see this flag, I do not think “Jihadists” or “Islamist extremists”. I think: “Pirates.”

Source for this image: Lawfare.

Cast your mind back to those forest wars between 1989 and 2003. Two of the most notorious warlords, the late Foday Sankoh and the imprisoned war criminal Charles Taylor both went to training camps in the late Muamar Ghadaffi’s Libya to learn the strategies of revolutionary terror. But did they bring The Revolution to their countries, as the name of the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone suggested and one of Taylor’s former female generals told me in person? No of course they did not. It was a pretext. Some may have believed in it, for sure. But for most it was…just a job. We’re only in it for the money. How did the boys call their looting sprees, anyone? Yes, you at the back? Correct! They called their looting sprees ‘Operation Pay Yourself.’

And so it is with the religious element we are dealing with here. Those kids that were smashing the shrines and the statues in Timbuktu would not be able to cite the Koran passages justifying their vandalism if their lives depended on it. Both sets of violent gangs share the same methods.

Barbarism. Islamic State executes Housseini Hamma Cissé, aka “DJ passant” because of his mobile musical services for the community that adored him. Murdered in cold blood, near Ménaka, November 28.

And these methods are? Gratuitous violence. Or have we forgotten that summarily executing people in the most gruesome ways did happen frequently in the forests and towns of West Africa, from the mass murders in a church in Monrovia, Liberia to the repeated carnage in Freetown, Sierra Leone; the vicious fights in Guéckédou, Guinea and the massacres in Duékoué, Côte d’Ivoire? The religious (in this case Islamic) element does not add another layer of horror to these acts. The horror is already there and it has the same purpose: terrorizing people into doing what the terrorisers want.

But remember also that the perpetrators operate mostly in armed gangs. These are not kingdoms or republics with large repressive systems at their disposal, capable of genocide or industrial scale mass murder, such as the Belgians committed in Congo, the Germans in Namibia, the British in South Africa and Kenya, the French in Niger, Cameroon and Algeria, the Italians in Ethiopia. Taylor and his goons ruled Liberia for six years; Sankoh never got the presidency of Sierra Leone. One criminal gang of terrorists with an overlay of religious fanaticism is holding sway in a shrinking part of northeastern Nigeria. Another is establishing an (undoubtedly short-lived) ‘khalifate’ in the remote northeast of Mali and they are only able to do this because the colonels mismanaging Mali from their suites in Bamako are not serious about defending the country; they prefer to take soldiers from a neighbouring country hostage or boring the United Nations to death with frivolous charges about France helping Al Qaeda. The Russian mercenaries of the Wagner PMC they have hired for an eye-watering amount of money to do the job they are supposed to be doing are singularly uninterested in taking on the armed gangs, who as a result do pretty much as they please. They fight Wagner – for the control of the artisanal gold mines. It’s business, st*p*d!

And where do they intend to take their business? What is the final destination of the Boulevard of Crime? To reiterate: the coast. Why? This I covered recently. Suffice to say that reaching the coast would obviously mean a colossal expansion of their business. The amount of loot to be had in, say, Abidjan dwarfs what can be stolen in Ansongo, Djibo and Tilaberi combined. And of course many West African coastal cities have direct air links with that well-known murky international hotbed of dodgy business, Dubaï.

An appropriately murky picture – by me – of a distinctly murky place.

Clearly, nobody outside these armed gangs wants this and there may finally be some concerted action under way to ensure this never happens: the Accra Initiative, a low-level network set up by five governments most directly concerned (Burkina Faso, Benin, Togo, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire) geared towards intelligence sharing and joint military action and grassroots campaigns to take away the lure of the gangs. This kind of joined-up thinking, in tandem with the creation of real economic prospects for the young folks most likely to be lured by the Siren Call of armed violence may yield results in the near future. I certainly hope so. After a decade of destruction, this region desperately needs success against the ever-expanding destabilising influence of these criminal groups, after the ambiguity of Opération Barkhane, the stillborn efforts of the G5 Force Sahel and Operation Takuba and the utter disaster of Russia’s Wagner killers. Here’s hoping that they get it right this time. And here’s hoping that eventual foreign (dare I say…Western) backers understand three things: that it is chiefly about money, crime and turf and not about religion, that the initiative must be with those affected and their governments, and that throwing military kit and troops at the problem solves nothing. The alternative is grim: the shutdown of a space the size of Western Europe.

Rain!

In the Sahel, rain is typically preceded by a dust storm, like the one that met me one afternoon in August 2020, as I was walking through the fine town of Ségou, just a few hours from Bamako. One moment I saw it crossing the river Djoliba, on which the town lies; the next I was enveloped in it. It was pitch dark and it was mid-afternoon. Luckily, I knew where I was: a stone’s throw or two away from a friendly hotel called L’Auberge but it wasn’t until I arrived at its entrance (following a sandy road by pointing my phone light straight down to my feet) that I saw the light above the door. It took another 30 minutes for the rain to finally begin and then it hit – hard. Stay indoors when this happens.

The sand and dust wall approaches, Ségou

Similar a few years earlier on a long stretch of street from the Ouagadougou suburb of Pissy past Gounghin and the headquarters of the FESPACO film festival and into town. Here, a wall of dust and sand came barrelling towards me as I was riding a bicycle and the effect was not unlike one of those Northwest European seasonal storms when gusts of wind tug at your bike and try to floor you. Except that this one came with tiny bits of sand and dust that stung. This forced me to do something humiliating that in principle I never do on principle: get off my bike. The sandstorm was mercifully short-lived but the rain that followed was relentless in its fury.

In a matter on minutes, roads become rivers where cars struggle. You will be astonished at the colossal amounts of water and wonder where on earth it all comes from; surely not only the sky… This was certainly my experience on another bike ride around Ouagadougou. I had foolishly ignored the warnings of thick clouds overhead and soon enough found myself negotiating the disappearing tar surface of the road all Ouagalais call La Périferique. I was attempting, unsuccessfully, to stay away from the water that kept invading until it had converted the road into a shallow river. Riding a bike in one of Ouaga’s ultra heavy rainshowers with unpredictable water movement is not really the occasion to push your luck, so I ended up sheltering under one of the very few overpasses the city possesses and stayed there, like many other very sensible Ouagalais, until the incessant lightning and thunder had died down a little and it was sort of over…

Serious storm clouds over Ouagadougou and its airport with the prettiest control tower anywhere… (pic: Burkina24)

Intimidating lighting, some of the most spectacular light shows you will see anywhere and huge downpours, as if whatever resides up there has decided to personally pull out all the stops and open every single tap it can possibly find and then stands aside laughing manically as the poor folks below scramble for safety. And scramble they must because these rains can kill. Abidjan, for instance, frequently gets hit: it sits on a lagoon and has built up areas sitting literally on the shoreline; it also receives copious amounts of rain, which then struggles to find a safe way out. Deaths are regularly reported from around town.

How does rain become such a problem? Among the factors (and a lot of them are related) we can count a near perfect storm of urbanisation at breakneck speed and climate change. Most if not all towns and cities in West Africa (I will limit myself to this region) have been growing at a dizzying rate. Bamako, Mali’s capital and my home for a couple of years was deemed Africa’s and even the world’s fastest growing city at the beginning of the second decade of this century. A tiny settlement at the end of the 19^th century, it became the administrative centre of what was then called French Soudan, while it was mostly limited to the north bank of the mighty Djoliba River.

Bamako’s first bridge was built only 65 years ago, thus linking the old town to the southern riverbank from where the city could spread. And spread it did. In 1990 Bamako had just shy of one million inhabitants; today it is close to four million. Such growth rates are beyond the administrative, logistical, infrastructural and service capacities of any city government. And it shows: roads are in very bad state and disintegrate almost visibly when it rains; electricity and water supply are patchy at best; traffic is anarchic and service levels low to non-existent. By contrast and as a predictable result, levels of self-reliance among the Bamakois are very high.

A rain-soaked street in Kalaban Coura, Bamako and yes that was once my bike…

Cities fill up because the countryside offers very little in the way of economic prospects. This is deliberate. Governments fear the city-based electorate and one way to keep the urban masses happy and prevent riots is by keeping food prices low. This is achieved by either not paying the farmers who still work the land enough for their produce or simply replacing locally produced food with cheap imports, which has the added advantage of keeping super rich and often corrupt traders happy; after all, they bankroll political parties and their candidates. What we have here is a vicious circle. Armed insurgencies and/or criminal enterprises that have been making their appearances since the early 1990s are nothing less or more than the bill being presented for these misguided and short-sighted policies. In the absence of viable rural economies (and indeed the absence of opportunities in cities), easily recruitable young men join these gangs and they will not go away any time soon.

This looks very much like the street in Angré, Cocody, Abidjan where I briefly rented an apartment eight years ago (pic captured from YouTube)

As if this isn’t bad enough you now must add further effects of climate change (rains are increasingly erratic and downpours have become noticeably more extreme), bad road design (usually without the sloping surface that should be mandatory here) and the city dwellers’ excruciatingly bad habits. Unfortunately, the concept of a common public space is not very alive here. You have your own home and direct surroundings, which you keep scrupulously spotless. And then you have the rest, which nobody gives a flying flip about. Hence stuff thrown from buses and cars, culverts converted into dumping grounds, drains full of masses of accursed plastic bags and every open space covered in rubbish. This leads to one thing: blockage and the near-certainty that when there is extreme rainfall people drown.

There’s almost certainly more but you get the idea. And so it is the same scene, repeated during every single rainy season every year, in Ouagadougou, in Bamako, Abidjan, Conakry, Banjul, the smaller urban centres throughout the West Africa region and, indeed, Dakar, where I am writing this and where I may have had a bit of a lucky escape.

Rond Point Philippe, Ouest Foire, Yoff, Dakar

I set out this last Friday afternoon, during what I thought to be a break in the rain of sufficient length to allow me to get a very late breakfast and sort out one or two other things. It soon became apparent that I had miscalculated. Badly. As I walked along an already rain-soaked sandy road towards a place called Rond Point Philippe (a busy roundabout named after a popular pharmacy) the skies opened once again amidst an orchestral suite of lightning and thunder. I walked briskly down the remaining streets (one right, one left, one…oh no, the street’s become a lake…retrace steps, one right, another right, one left and onto the roundabout, which has a brand new bridge in the middle where I thought I was going to stay until the rain would let up.

No such luck.

I found my way blocked by a solid mass of water. I stayed put under a tiny overhang, just small enough to keep me less wet than I would have been otherwise, as I contemplated my next move. I quickly concluded, as one car waded past and caused a stern wave that almost spilled over the ramp where I was standing and into the shop behind me, that any next move would involve getting my feet wet. Beyond the bridge I spotted a Brioche d’Or, known for good coffee, and unpredictable levels of food quality and service. But how to get there?

I braved the rain and plunged into what had been a street, waded across and found that beyond the small collection of street stalls (now closed) where I had thought to find a strip of land high enough to get me across the street and to the bridge there was more water. Oh well. Caution to the, er, rain then.

From my table at the Brioche d’Or. Yes, I made it there.

Traffic was the least of my worries: it had come to a complete stop. I walked across to that bridge and waited, hoping for the now solid sheet of water coming down relentlessly to subside just a bit. Which it did.

The Brioche d’Or felt like a place under siege. Nowhere was really dry but that was fine because nobody was, including yours truly who did not have a dry stitch on his body by now… Being under siege from the elements brought fleeting solidarity among those who had managed to get under its protective roof. And Brioche had a life saver: coffee! And a half decent burger and very nice service. So we sat on this veranda-like place, waiting for it all to calm down…deep in conversation about how this was all the fault of the government because the roads were badly constructed and how we should know how to deal with these things by now because this happens every year and so on……..

The rain continued. The traffic stalled. Somewhere a siren (I presumed the fire brigade) wailed incessantly, clearly attached to a vehicle that was unable to move like the rest. Why this was the case I was about to find out. Because the rain eventually did let up and I could safely leave. I paid the waitress and walked from the low point where the Rond Point was located (no wonder it was now a lake) in the direction of my old street. Worse was to come.

First thing I found was that traffic on the bridge was blocked, because it was virtually impossible to go past this…

“There is no way through,” I was told by some folks coming from where I thought I was going. To my left, across the flooded exit road leading to the Rond Point I saw a procession of people gingerly negotiating a bit of pavement between the road and the parking lot of the Yoff Municipal Authority, also flooded. Water swirled around their feet. Oh well. Turn around, go there, keep your luggage dry (including a laptop I had weirdly deemed necessary to bring along and which had managed to keep miraculously dry inside its plastic shell) and hope for the best. Walking back, I noticed a bit of a riot.

Yes, a bunch of neighbourhood kids had turned their bit of flooded highway into a swimming pool and were having a grand old time splashing about in a watery dance they repeated every ten metres or so, pretending to bail out the water right in front of the vehicles that just stood there, engines switched off.

Time to be on my way. I joined the procession I just described and had a scare twice, when there was a clear surge in the water streaming across from the other side of the highway where the boys were swimming. Where did that come from? Cars that had decided to move after all? A stream spontaneously joining another stream somewhere? There’s no way you can tell where exactly all this water is coming from and where it is going except to the lowest point which is roughly where you are walking right now… Bits and chunks of ground had given way under the weight of the cascades and if this happens when you stand on one such spot you’re toast.

That’s where I walked too, gingerly…. I first negotiated the other side of the exit road you see here, to the right That’s where I took the pic of the splashing kids.

We all made it, and walked to wherever. Me to the seventh floor of a hotel on the big thoroughfare that was and remained blocked solid in both directions for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening.

There’s no solution in sight, especially not when the causes are so complex. What can and probably should be done is make a real effort to change peoples’ behaviour, invest in more and better infrastructure and prevent people from dying because there are fewer deaths more terrible (I think) than drowning, like the one driver who got stuck in an underpass near Mermoz and did not live to tell the tale. And at the very end the best idea is probably to turn rural areas into economically viable zones so that people do not feel the need to migrate to these already overcrowded cities or even less to pick up an AK47 and start attacking them because the villages offers no prospects whatsoever.

The Corona Chronicles, Bamako

Part five – “Hey, Coronavirus! Go back to your country!”

 

“Is Corona a white disease?”

It was a question a Senegalese newspaper asked when it was found that most if not all people who had brought the disease into the West African nation were Europeans. Or had been in close proximity to Europeans. “Is France coronising Africa…” was a clever pun made in Dakar, when the March 4 headline of the Rewmi (Nation) newspaper announced that “another Frenchman” had been found to be contaminated.

The foreign origin of the virus gave rise to this blog piece I wrote, which was subsequently translated into my native Dutch and went on to cause a bit of a stir, especially among people with reading comprehension issues. No, of course I was not advocating “ethnic profiling” white people; if you actually read the end of the piece you will immediately dismiss that idea. It is arrant nonsense.

Meanwhile, I am happy to report that when out and about on my long trips through the vast sprawling Malian capital I have not once been addressed as “the white man who carries Corona”. The virus is seen as a problem that we all must overcome. To be sure, behaviour does not always match rhetoric and I will be writing about this again shortly but it is refreshing to see that, so far, the kind of xenophobic nonsense that the virus appears to have spawned elsewhere has not taken hold here. People were, are and remain their usual polite selves. It’s a cultural thing. After all, when you, as a country, have been around for a thousand years you may have picked up a few things along the way…

Meanwhile, there was a neat little bit of actual ethnic profiling happening in The Netherlands and I am wondering whether this upset the same people who were so terribly terribly shocked by their erroneous interpretation of my piece. It concerns this gem. Commentary and translation provided through that link.

The song – if you want to grace the plodding sequence with such a name – suggests that we should stop eating food that’s prepared by what the singer terms “stinky Chinese”; if you do not eat Chinese food you don’t have to be afraid. Of the virus, apparently. Chinese people were accosted on Dutch streets with “Hey, Coronavirus”. But hey – that’s banter, right. It’s fun-ny….

As the late and forever and always great Ian Dury would say in a heavy Cockney accent: no it ain’. It is crass and offensive and serves no purpose. It does not even inform; it just paints a bad and grotesquely inaccurate picture of one particular demographic.

Like the virus itself, this kind of behaviour spreads rapidly. There are reports from Abidjan where Chinese workers have been similarly aggravated. There is a growing scandal about the treatment of Africans in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, who have been moved from their homes and hotel rooms, ostensibly in an attempt to keep the spread of the virus in check. This became so bad that it took concerted action by African governments to put a stop to it.

The pandemic has given the usual suspects an opportunity to mount their hobby horse and hammer home their familiarly depressing mantra that “the borders must be closed”. It has given others to opportunity to get onto their White Saviour high hobby horse. We need none of this. Stop pointing fingers at others. The problem is you. And me.

Corona may well have exposed the limits of unchecked globalisation. But instead of giving us the impetus to draw up the bridges, retreat in our bunkers and forget about the world outside, it hopefully gives us the opportunity to build something new, something better and more equitable. A society that starts understanding the value of everything, not just its price. A society that cares for the marginalised, the vulnerable, the frail, the ones cast adrift without their knowledge or consent. A society that stops pretending to care about these groups by throwing them crumbs from the table. A society that recognises that bulldozing away Nature and not giving Her the chance to regenerate is a society on its way to oblivion.

If this whole episode can teach us one thing, this should be it. It should mark the end of the catastrophically misguided “Free market- Free for all – Greed is good – Me first” Thatcher/Reagan revolution that set this train in motion, which is hitting the buffers as we speak.

Here endeth today’s sermon. And for heaven’s sake: do not start playing John Lennon’s Imagine. I can’t stand that piece of sanctimonious piffle that lulls you to sleep instead of making you bloody angry.

Border crossings: same country, worlds apart

Dakar’s old Leopold Sedar Senghor airport was an indescribable mess with poor to non-existent information for the travelling public, even fewer facilities, swarms of mosquitoes and chairs that were clearly designed to cause maximum spinal damage to the largest number of passengers possible. It was upgraded earlier this century and the situation indoors improved markedly. It involved monitors with flight information you could actually read.

One thing remained firmly in place and that was the scene outside.

Upon putting your nose out the door you’d be accosted by an army of hustlers and touts, all wanting to put their hands on your money by selling you telephone cards you didn’t want, change money you didn’t need or offer discount prices for hotels you had no intention of staying in. By far the most persistent lot were the members of – arguably – West Africa’s most tenacious taxi racket.

Having attached his person to you with indissoluble glue, a tout would not let go until you were ‘safely’ deposited in one of the ubiquitous black-and-yellow French or Japanese contraptions waiting in a badly lit parking lot (many flights had and still have the inconvenient habit of arriving very late at night). Objective attained, the tout, the driver, the person overseeing the running order, the person manning the entry/exit of the parking lot and anybody else who thought it necessary to stick his oar in were going to discuss the amount for which they were going to fleece you. Of course, there was a way around the scam, which was to just keep walking away from the airport building, in spite of the ever more insistent utterances and gesticulations of the tout who was seeing his cash dispenser disappear, and post yourself OUTSIDE the airport gate at the next crossroad, where you could pick up taxis for the normal tariff. It would happen, on occasion, that a member of the aforementioned taxi mafia thus scorned would drive up and stalk you equally insistently but would eventually get the message after hearing for the eleventh time that you had no need for his vastly overpriced services. With the new airport, that’s all gone and, frankly, it’s not being missed.

The old airport. Now a strictly military zone.

These days, you arrive at a magnificent new facility, the Blaise Diagne International Airport. (There were rumours at one point that it would be named after Senegal’s third president who started the project, Abdoulaye Wade, but that did not happen.) Entry and exit are remarkably orderly. Immigration? Walk up to one of the squeaky clean counters, hand over your passport. You’ll be asked for your phone number, you then place your fingers on the EU-funded scanners (the officer will kindly help you if you don’t understand how it works) while looking into a small camera, your passport gets stamped and off you go to the luggage hall.

Outside, there a just a few taxis, which stands to reason because the thing has been built some 50 kilometres away from Dakar – and you only have to make it clear ONCE that you are taking the very reasonably priced airport bus for just under €10 and away they go. There are, would you believe it, working ATMs. I feel a pang of wistful longing for the rattling, coughing, wheezing conveyor belt that would spew out your luggage at the old airport, permanently indicating that it was five seconds from giving up the ghost for good – but this particular brand of nostalgia never lasts longer than, oh, three seconds. I am a heartless b*st*rd. Sue me.

The glittering new hall of Dakar’s new airport.

The new airport is an oasis of smooth efficiency. Even when it went massively over budget (bit like the Amsterdam North-South underground, which may be the most expensive piece of pipe ever laid in human history) it is well-ordered and, what’s more: it is smack in the right place, roughly the equal distance from Dakar, the seaside resort of Mbour and the railroad centre of Thiès. Moreover, it is an integrated part of a gigantic urban development area called Diamniadio, previously an unassuming hamlet where two trunk roads met. I hope to be able to delve into that at some point in the future. Here are some impressions, from behind a very dirty window. Public transport, hey…

Diamniadio, under construction

Diamniadio, with Senegal’s ‘Emergence’ logo prominently on the façade. 

Compare and contrast this with the two main border crossings with neighbouring Mali, located deep in deepest Senegal. They are Kidira (the northern crossing) and a hamlet somewhere behind Saraya (the southern crossing). Saraya is reached after a smooth ride from Senegal’s ‘capital of the East’, Tambacounda, using a brand new road all the way to the mining town of Kédougou, a good 200 kilometres south. This is followed by another stretch, shorter but in really poor nick and bordering on the catastrophic the closer you get to the border. Once across, things get marginally better. The road takes you straight to Kita, a mere hop from Bamako.

The road between Tambacounda and Kidira currently looks like this. Now, imagine nearly 200 kilometres of that… True, this is the rainy season but those potholes don’t go away when the rains stop. Nothing could be further from smooth efficiency here! When you travel by bus (as I frequently do) you will almost invariably end up at the border in the dead of night, thanks to the bus company’s time tables. This road takes you to the hub of Kayes, and from there it is another truly gruelling 600 kilometres to Bamako.

It does not really make much difference whether you take the slightly larger post at Kidira or the smaller (slightly less unpleasant) post after Saraya, the ritual is the same.

Everybody files out of the bus. Outside is a policeman who will collect identity cards, loose papers and even a passport or two from the 70-odd passengers on the bus. He takes his haul into a open space adjacent to a sparsely lit building – and disappears inside.

And then, for quite a while: nothing happens.

Then, the door opens. Out comes another policeman with a stack of identity cards. These are usually the first ones to go. Now you have to strain your ears because he will call out the names of the owners of these tiny documents. Once. Rarely twice. If you miss it, you’ll have to wait until the whole not terribly merry crowd has been called and reclaim your card.

Once your name has been called you saunter, walk or strut (in an unexaggerated manner if you please) to the officer holding your card. If you are NOT a national of the country you are now leaving, you will be taken indoors and made to pay. (The same applies for the control posts inside any country, frequently referred to as “petit boutiques” by the travellers.) And even though I am subjected to exactly the same mediaeval treatment, I don’t pay. To some, this is passport privilege and I would agree. To the travelling public at large, this is an egregious dereliction of duty by taxpayer-salaried officers who get away with this behaviour because hardly anyone is supervising them, even less reporting them. But it is happening. Raising a stink about it will empty your pockets even faster and you may end up in jail. These uniforms are lord and master here and they have ways to remind you of that simple basic fact.

Of course, this practice makes a complete mockery of the idea that we are somehow in a free travel zone, as declared every so often by the assembled heads of state when they meet. The gap between their air-conditioned rhetoric and the dusty realities on the ground is staggering.

If people could afford travelling like this, they would, at the drop of a hat. Would you believe it…I wrote this ten years ago!

This happens everywhere and if you think for a second that this is a uniquely West African phenomenon, think again. These are humiliation rituals and the argument always used is that ‘the other side’ (in this case: Mali) started stealing from travellers first. How on god’s green earth are you going to build a thriving commercial region of some 350 million people, let alone continent-wide unity if you turn every single border crossing into a bloody ordeal? And that’s before we get to the next stop: Customs. They will take their sweet time checking every single item on the bus if they haven’t been paid off by the chaps running the bus operation…

I can guarantee you that when you are travelling on a bus you will spend at least three hours at every single border crossing like this: waiting. This was during the day, on the Mali-Senegal border, whilst travelling into Senegal. Do not make the mistake of pointing your phone at either an official building (recognisable by the national flag) or an officer. You will get yourself into colossal amounts of trouble for nothing.

This is a picture I took a little while ago in the delightful city of Marrakech. In the cramped worldview of those to the right of the political spectrum, the name of this city has become synonymous with the supposed existence of a Treaty that Opens All European Borders.

No such Treaty exists. The Marrakech Compact is a non-binding agreement aimed at what the United Nations term ‘safe, orderly and regular migration’. Nothing about present-day migration is safe, orderly or regular and this is mainly because the European Union and individual European governments want it that way. There has never been a European Open Door policy; the entire EU policy is built around this central notion: keep as many of them out. As my colleague Linda Polman outlines in her meticulously researched book (review coming up shortly), European governments, like the EU, have standing policies designed to make life for migrants and refugee hell on earth.

Unlike the EU, which allows for free travel within its space and tries to keep everybody else away from the Eurotables that groan under the weight of affluence, West Africa must sort out its internal travel woes first. When the Marrakech Compact was voted in the United Nations General Assembly, all nations from the region voted in favour with the exception of two absentees, Guinea and Togo. More importantly, ECOWAS, the union of fifteen West African nations ranging from heavyweight Nigeria to minnows like Gambia, Benin and Togo and everything in between, has committed itself repeatedly to free travel in its huge five million square kilometre space, allowing its 350 million inhabitants the pleasure of moving from Dakar to Niamey and from Abuja to Conakry, hassle-free. On current evidence, and in spite of all the declarations about free travel and trade, these freedoms only exist if you are prepared to fork out ridiculous amounts of cash (when you own a transport business) and allow your pockets to be picked if you are a member of the travelling public. Not only is this grotesque, it also ensures that West African consumers pay far more for a piece of merchandise than is needed.

The Falémé River marks the border between Senegal and Mali

Sure, the view is great. Now, how about turning these bright visions and vistas into reality. Hello ECOWAS: this is 2020 calling…you’ve got work to do. Clean up the borders!!

Fortress Brussels

A few years ago I saw something strange. A boat. In the water. Ok, that’s normal but this was strange: it was a patrol boat of the Spanish Guardia Civil, flying a Spanish flag, in the Port of…no, not Barcelona or Malaga or Cordoba or Bilbao or any other seaport of that magnificent country. It was in the Port of Dakar.

What the devil is a Spanish police patrol boat doing in the territorial waters of Senegal? Turned out that it was just another manifestation of the intense and heroic efforts by the European Union and its member states to keep as many Africans out of their Fortress as possible. The same efforts that put Brussels in bed with autocrat-run Turkey and one of the nominal governments of Libya, destroyed thanks to the heroic efforts of no fewer than the three former administrations of France, the UK and the USA. Another part of this Fortress Europe strategy is the blackmailing of countries like Mali and Niger: we will give you aid if you stop your people from coming here. Niger’s people smugglers now must trace far more dangerous routes than before, thanks to government crackdowns, sponsored by the EU. Brussel’s aim is to ensure more people die on their way to the Mediterranean Sea than on their way to a southern European shore.

It’s all a far cry from the start of the EU, a collaborative effort around (re)building industry and achieving food self-sufficiency. At roughly the same time the Geneva Convention on Refugees was adopted, a suitably clear and concise document. This was, of course, also the time of the Cold War. The refugees that made it into Western Europe came, mostly, from the “enemy” camp. Hungarians were welcome in 1956, when they fled the Soviet assault on their country; one of those refugee families would later produce a president – Nicholas Sarkozy. In “our own” camp, Portuguese conscientious objectors ran away from their country, run by a fascist dictatorship, because they did not want to fight Portugal’s colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique and Guiné-Bissau. And there was a broadly-based welcome for people from Latin America on the run from US-installed military dictatorships. All in the 1970s.

Ségou, on the river. Dreadful place, innit?

It’s almost 30 years since the end of the Cold War. “We” won and now “we” are touting ourselves as the best society the world has ever seen. It follows, therefore, that Everybody Wants To Come Here and “we” must be selective about who “we” let in.

The only people being selective here are the “we” in this last paragraph. Selective of the facts. Speaking from the region I know a few things about, West Africa, the truth of the matter is that the vast, overriding, overwhelming majority of people…does not move. And if they do, they tend to go to other parts of the continent, or to China, the Gulf States…and yes, Europe. The picture of migration worldwide is decidedly mixed. However: the idea that Europe is some kind of a massive people magnet reminds me of that infamous French colonial drawing, where The Light (from Paris, of course) illuminated the entire Dark Continent – or at least the bits that had been visited by migrating French army boots. In short – it is an over-estimation of one’s worth and borders on the delusional. Seen from here, you don’t look all that great. And that’s before we even take a closer look at how you have been behaving to your own people of late.

This will not be a review, short of saying that what you see here is the cover of the most riveting piece of political reporting since Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail. It is also a damning indictment of how EU bigwigs treat the poorer members of their community – and how petty, vindictive and downright brutal they get when these members turn out to have ideas of their own. Fear and Loathing, indeed.

I visited Thessaloniki in 2012 for a world music trade fair called WOMEX. It was wonderful. But even then the austerity programs were kicking in and the people responded by staging the largest street demonstration I had seen since the epic 1981 marches against those US cruise missiles. A sea of red flags. Similar happened in austerity-hit Portugal. Varoufakis recounts in detail how the EU/IMF “rescue package” was part of a bailout plan to save…not Greece, but French and German banks that had taken irresponsible risks and found themselves overexposed. Politicians in EU member states sold another bailout of financially irresponsible banksters by inventing the story that this was all about…saving Greece. In short, they lied. Most mainstream media slavishly copied the lies without doing their job, something that happens with depressing frequency.

When the bailout did not work – and Varoufakis extensively explains why this is so – they did it again. And lied about it – again. The engine room of this elaborate deceit is a thing called the Eurogroup, a gathering of Europe’s finance ministers, accountable to no-one. Even though it is – sortalike – formalised in the Lisbon Treaty I would not hesitate to call the whole structure de facto illegal and a flagrant violation of the EU’s founding principles. The president of this informal group of financial terrorists was, between 2013 and January 2018, a Dutch politician by the name of Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who emerges as a thoroughly unpleasant piece of work. He clashed frequently with Varoufakis, on the basis of politics disguised as policy. The Eurogroup consists of people who like to present themselves as technocrats but are in fact hard-headed ideologues, tightly moulded in the TINA frame (There Is No Alternative) of no debt relief, screw your people, cause misery, keep taking the poison and keep lying to your national electorates why “we” are strangling one of our member states to death. Read the book for the details, fascinating and shocking in equal measure.

But the point of it all is this.

Varoufakis argues, forcefully, that extreme austerity imposed by external financial terrorists causes widespread misery and pushes people over the edge. And then, society shifts towards political polarisation. The sea of red flags in Thessaloniki was one example of this but it can also take on more sinister tones. The counterpoint to resurgent socialism is the worrisome rise of fascism, not the cotton candy variety of lightweight intellectuals like the late Pim Fortuyn and the still very alive Thierry Baudet in the Netherlands, not even the clownish two-trick pony Geert Wilders no, this is the violent, iron-clad boots variety of Golden Dawn, who have committed murder. The focal point of this resurgent extremism? You guessed it: migration. Increased hardship frequently goes hand in hand with blaming “foreigners” for problems they had no hand in creating.

Why people move (my photo, taken at a market near Tenado, Burkina Faso)

It is this kind of extremism, fomented by bad policies emanating from disconnected “technocrats” that Varoufakis warns against. Fortress Brussels ignores this at its peril. But this is not about Brexit, that unilateral folly of very English self-sabotage. Brexit addresses none of these issues. It is an unwelcome and time-consuming inconvenience for the EU, it will be grotesquely damaging to what is left of the United Kingdom, and it is most likely to be temporary (at least until Scottish independence…).

No, this goes much deeper and concerns entrenched dogma that must be urgently challenged. The damage that the Washington Consensus did to the nations of Africa, Latin America and Asia has been incalculable and it would be a fine day to see the perpetrators of this crime held accountable in a court of law. Now that the Washington Consensus has moved to Brussels, the damage is being done to countries on Europe’s southern flank, the same region made to cope, on the cheap, with a mixture of refugees looking for safety and others looking for opportunities.

The only answer thus far has been to reinforce the Fortress. The Mediterranean has become increasingly militarised and the EU has extended its border operation southwards, as far as Senegal and Niger. Like the imposed austerity, this is an Extremely Dumb and Colossally Expensive Idea. Cheaper and more intelligent answers exist: debt rescheduling/forgiveness and providing stimuli to the economy in the case of near-bankrupt states; the re-instatement of the – sneakily abolished – 1951 Geneva Convention in the case of refugees; the creation of avenues for legal, circular migration for the “problem” of people moving to Europe. Once again, for the hard of hearing, people generally do not willingly exchange their place in the sun for a precarious existence in Europe’s cold, dark, grey, hostile and sometimes even murderous streets. For the vast majority of the people outside looking in, you don’t look all that great.

Les Grandes Personnes de Boromo, at the opening carnival of the – very aptly named – Festival Rendez-vous chez nous, Ouagadougou 2017. Pic: me.

Fortress Brussels has been rattled but not enough. There have been a few stabs at the bubble of self-delusion, hypocrisy and lies that surrounds the policies of austerity and the militarisation of the borders but it has not yet burst. However, burst it must. The betrayal of Europe’s foundational principles has been ugly, continuing down the same path leads to an outcome that is both ghastly and familiar. This is no exaggeration. As the ideological technocrats continue to do their destructive “work”, as chunks of societies splinter and become uncontrollable extremist fragments, as the narrative about people moving to Europe becomes ever more toxic, as identity politics takes the place of progressive discourse, as Fortress Brussels continues to push dumb and expensive ideas instead of the much cheaper and far more intelligent – and available! – alternatives, Europe risks, in all seriousness, a return to the situation the EU was constructed to prevent. By its own hand.

 

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.

The hunt

‘Aaaarghhhhhh!’

There is nothing more annoying than waking up in the morning and having to go hunting for a missing item that is essential in creating one of life’s basic necessities. But here I was and there it was not. Nothing for it but put on shoes, presentable trousers, ditto shirt and hit the street.

8am This was going to be easy. The first shop just across the road has it. Always does. Except that it did not. Hm. Where next? Ha! I know a neat little supermarket down the road, turn right and

BEEP BEEP BEEP

No I don’t need a taxi, as you can very clearly see, you nut you.

8h15am Lovely supermarket. Really nice place. Neat rows. Well instead of wandering around admiring the neat rows full of stuff I don’t need (unlike some people, I do not treat supermarkets as art galleries or de facto museums), I’ll go and ask that very nice lady who is wearing a supermarket uniform. ‘Have you got…’

‘Sorry, no we haven’t seen that item here for…Asha how long haven’t we seen this for…?’ Anyway. Out the door and

BEEP BEEP BEEP

Hello? You don’t have to advertise services I am not interested in, you case you. Honesty obliges: the audio assault by taxi drivers from behind their wheels has diminished somewhat. It appears word has gotten around that the toubabs (those sun-challenged Europeans) don’t like being barked at while walking innocently along the street. I know many Dakarois share my massive irritation but are, as usual, way too polite to do anything about it.

Anyway. I am outside that very nice supermarket and it’s 8h25. Where next? Short of hitting downtown Dakar, which really is ridiculous considering how easy this thing was available only last month, there are two more places to go.

So off we go. On foot.

8h45 ‘Salaam aleikoum’

‘Maleikoum Salaam’

This is the small overstuffed but very friendly neighborhood super. Greetings are in order.

‘How is everything?’

‘We thank God.’

‘Do you have…’

Yes, he does. It’s right there on the shelf. Except that…it’s the wrong size. Quick. A plan, please. If I just walk from here to the Hypermarket (yes, we have those too), that’s a mere 20 more minutes – but wait a minute. Can I really be from home for so long without inviting unwelcome guests? Ever since a laundry list of stuff was taken from my flat last year I never leave without the essentials on my person. Turn back. Go home. Get bag. Load up all work-related items and I am on my rather less merry way to aforementioned Hypermarket.

9h25 Arrival. The guards by now know that no-one, and that means absolutely no-one comes between me and my gear and I rush to the shelf where much-needed item is surely waiting for me. It is. I thought. It’s not.

Wrong size.

So the plan goes into operation. I return to the neighbourhood super that I’d rather give my business to (9h50), grab two packets from the shelf and think: scissors. Scissors? Yes, scissors. Back home (10am). Open up packet. Grab scissors. Cut into the first paper and right-size it. Two hours and eight minutes later I finally have achieved the incredible.

Well, yes, I forgot putting the scissors in the picture.

Inexplicably, Yoff had run out of coffee filters size 4. The very next day I went back to the same little supermarket to get some cheese and of course, out of nowhere, they had re-appeared. Never mind. BEEP. No thanks. I’ll walk.

 

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!!’

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.