TRANSPORT: Travelling within West Africa a Nightmare

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Noel Tadegnon

LOME, May 6 2002 (IPS) - Travelling within West Africa can be a nightmare. Roads are bad, and passengers often spend long hours covering a short distance.

“You need about six or seven hours to travel from Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) to Niamey (Niger), a distance of just 500 kilometres,” laments Moussa Toure, chairperson of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU).

The 1,000-km road between Dakar, the capital of Senegal and Bamako, Mali, which is crucial for trade in the region, is also impassable, says Toure.

To ease the problem, the West African Economic and Monetary Union has announced plans to improve the sub-region’s highway infrastructure.

WAEMU members — Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote D’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo — share a common currency, the CFA franc.

Boni Yagi, President of the West African Development Bank (WADB) based in the Togolese capital, Lome says “Transport infrastructure plays an essential role in integrating the economies of member union states.”

“They also ensure the free movement of people and goods,” he adds.

WADB, a specialised financial institution of the West African Economic and Monetary Union, has embarked on a programme to upgrade the Union’s two main axis roads which run along the Atlantic coast, and which bisect the Sahel.

The coastal road that runs from Nouakchott in Mauritania to Lagos, Nigeria via Banjul (Gambia), Bissau (Guinea-Bissau), Conakry (Guinea), Abidjan (Cote D’Ivoire), Lome (Togo), and Cotonou (Benin) is 4,560-kilometre long; but only 3,800kms of it are paved.

The other road — the trans-Sahelian — which starts in Dakar, and ends in Ndjamena, Chad passes through Bamako (Mali), Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), and Niamey (Niger). But only 3,900 of the 4,460-kilometre road are asphalted.

Another problem, which discourages passengers from travelling from Dakar to Cotonou through Banjul, Bissau, Conakry, Abidjan, and Lome is random checkpoints set up along the road.

“Recently we counted 60 checkpoints between Abidjan and Bamako, and about 50 between Ouagadougou and Cotonou,” says Toure.

“At every border post, there are various administrative formalities to go through; and police, and customs agents, demand bribes,” according to Mahamadou Issa, a Malian trucker who plies the highway.

Concurring, Firmin Guidiglo, a truck driver from Togo, says the police “always demand money, and don’t let you go until you’ve complied. We waste hours like that, arguing with them at every roadblock.”

The plan is to have 11-border posts set within the UEMOA zone.

Under its ten-year plan, WAEMU is planning to rebuild a 13,300-kilometre road network and create checkpoints, through its Community Action Programme for Highway Transportation, to reduce the harassment and hodgepodge of checkpoints, which prevent the free flow of people and goods.

Yagi believes that “the programme is an essential element of the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) road infrastructure programme”.

NEPAD, the brainchild of African leaders, calls for donor involvement. According to UEMOA forecasts, it will cost 1,254 billion CFA francs (around 1.79 billion U.S. dollars).

WAEMU presented the project to the donors during a meeting held in Lome in March. The delegates, who came mostly from various financial institutions, pledged 480 billion CFA francs (around 685.7 million U.S. dollars), complementing the 281 billion CFA francs (about 401.4 million U.S. dollars) already raised by WAEMU to start the initial phase of the project.

“We support WAEMU’s strategy because it deals with real road maintenance issues and how to facilitate international transport, which for us are essential,” says Thierry de Saint-Maurice, a European Union representative.

“At present, a billion Euros will be channelled into transportation infrastructures in the sub-region. We’ll have to check with member states, the ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States), and WAEMU to what extent they want to channel a part of these funds into regional integration infrastructures,” says Saint-Maurice.

The World Bank, too, is interested in the project. “We support harmonisation strategies in transportation policy because the World Bank has decided to strengthen its regional integration programmes,” explains Marie-Francoise Marie-Nelly, director of African programmes for the World Bank.

“This is such an important project for integration, for the economy, and for trade that we can’t imagine any donor nation having second thoughts,” she says.

“As a great man once said, the road to development is through the development of the road,” says Toure.