Some more about Kaolack.
Kaolack should be Senegal's second largest city. It sits at the top of a 100 km long estuary, a brackish arm of the sea. This lets Kaolack be a deep-water port -- something that's not so common in West Africa. (Senegal has two. Most of the other countries in the region have one apiece.) However, the estuary is muddy, so any port will silt up and need to be dredged every few years. If it's not dredged, it's shallow-draft only. It hasn't been dredged for a while.
Kaolack sits in the middle of the Peanut Basin, which is an area with decent soil, a fair amount of rainfall (though concentrated in three months per year) and rather a lot of sunshine. The Basin should be an agricultural powerhouse, exporting all over the world. Instead it's full of poor subsistence farmers, small peanut growers who can barely produce a modest surplus, and some plantations run by the Mourides. (The Mourides are a religious... group. Need a post of their own.)
Kaolack used to have a rail line to Dakar. Senegal's rail system was privatized a few years back, the privatization was botched, and the rail line has been dead for years. The rails are still there, but I suspect it would take some money to get the railroad running again -- there are years of deferred maintenance.
Kaolack has roads, of course, but they're not very good. The one to Dakar is a two-laner with a lot of potholes. Others are worse, or much worse.
So what does it all mean?
Let's start with the obvious: God obviously intended for Kaolack to be two things. First and foremost, it should be the economic capitol of the Peanut Basin, draining the Basin's agricultural surplus out to the world while providing warehousing, processing, and services from tractor sales to banking. Second, it should be a regional port and a backup to Dakar, servicing the interior of Senegal and a fair chunk of Guinea-Bissau and Gambia as well.
Instead, it's a garbage-filled slum. The port works, but for shallow draft only. That means everything for export has to be reloaded at Dakar, which adds delay and expense. And transport links to the interior are horrible, so only a trickle of stuff is going in and out anyway. The lack of cheap access to markets is keeping the Peanut Basin poor. The poor farmers are drifting off the land and into cities; since Kaolack is the nearest citiy, the Basin's rural poor are silting up there, unable to either go back or move forward.
Basically, it's a huge blocked drain.
The problem here seems to be almost purely one of infrastructure. Kaolack was prosperous in colonial days, and in the first generation after independence. The current decline started after 1980, and accelerated dramatically in the last 15 years -- during which time, pretty much nothing has been done to improve or even maintain Kaolack's port or roads.
Large infrastructure projects are the responsibility of the central government. The Kaolackois have a variety of theories as to why the government is screwing them over. Here are the two that seem most plausible:
1) Since 1980, Kaolack has consistently supported opposition candidates and parties. Over many election cycles, this has encouraged consecutive governments to punish Kaolack.
2) Dakar is suppressing Kaolack, because it doesn't want a rival port.
I find both these plausible, though neither is entirely satisfying. (Would successive governments really be that assholic? Kaolack is 1/10 the size of Dakar, and much poorer; is it really a plausible rival?) I'd throw in a third: Kaolack has now reached a state where fixing its problems would require some real money. While Senegal is doing OK by West African standards, they don't have a lot of money to throw around. So even if everyone meant well, it wouldn't be easy to reverse 30 years of neglect.
On the other hand, at least it should be possible, and (I think) fairly straightforward. Dredge the port, fix the roads, maybe get the railroad running again. You could throw in some frills like a special tariff for imports there, or maybe a Special Economic Zone -- I don't love those, but this seems like one place they might do some good. But really, just fix the infrastructure. Unclog the drain, and stuff will flow. Or so it seems to me.
And that's my very brief development case study for today.
Senegal's rail system was privatized
I found the fault. At least with the railways.
Posted by: Alex | June 21, 2009 at 04:04 AM
It's clear that the privatization was a complete botch --
http://www.alterinter.org/article3289.html?lang=fr
-- but it's not clear to me why.
Doug M.
Posted by: Doug M. | June 21, 2009 at 02:46 PM
I am not aware of a successful railway privatisation, anywhere. Put it like this: it was a fucking catastrophe in the country that invented railways and indeed privatisation, what do you expect anywhere else?
Posted by: Alex | June 21, 2009 at 04:18 PM
Freight privatization has worked well in Mexico, Alex.
Posted by: Noel Maurer | June 21, 2009 at 05:46 PM
In addition, freight privatization has been extremely successful in Panama.
http://noelmaurer.typepad.com/aab/2008/12/improved-carrier-asset-utilization.html
Why the facile overgeneralization? It seems unlike you.
Posted by: Noel Maurer | June 21, 2009 at 05:57 PM
Do the Panamanians still own their rails? Do they get to have safety inspection by railwaymen, if at all? Based on UK experience, this last is far from given.
Freight can be an open-access service, I grant, but I'm leery of it anyway, because these things just tend to not exist any more once you let the buggers in.
Posted by: Alex | June 22, 2009 at 04:01 AM
Alex: an American consortium owns the railroad, under a concession issued by the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), which owns the land. I'm not sure how they run safety inspections. The ACP is one of world's best-run government enterprises --- it made sense for them to contract out the rehabilitation and operation of the railroad rather than try to run the operation in-house.
Doug: one possibility is that the railroad was inherently a white-elephant. The question, then, would be whether operating subsidies are a reasonable expenditure given the other demands on the Senegalese fisc. That I don't know.
Posted by: Noel Maurer | June 22, 2009 at 05:20 AM
Noel, it might be a white elephant, but I'm inclined to doubt it. The French built those rail lines a long time ago -- the Kaolack connection was in 1911 -- and they got used pretty intensively all through the colonial period.
Okay, colonial lines often got built for non-economic reasons. But... we're talking a 200 km line over perfectly flat land between the capital and the second or third largest city, which sits in the middle of a major agricultural region. You gotta think it's possible to run that at a profit.
Doug M.
Posted by: Doug M. | June 22, 2009 at 03:03 PM
I'd agree with that as a null hypothesis. If I were doing an analysis of the region's transport needs, the first thing I'd do is gather up as much data as I could about the railroad's operations from 1911 up to whenever it shut down.
Posted by: Noel Maurer | June 22, 2009 at 08:52 PM
If someone would pay me to do it, I totally would.
The story of the railway privatization is pretty depressing. Corruption plus stupidity plus incompetence, and it's ordinary Senegalese who are paying the price.
Doug M.
Posted by: Doug M. | June 22, 2009 at 09:10 PM
Who is Karim Wade?
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero | June 22, 2009 at 10:42 PM
The story of the railway privatization is pretty depressing. Corruption plus stupidity plus incompetence, and it's ordinary ------- who are paying the price.
This could be Britain...
Posted by: Alex | June 22, 2009 at 11:00 PM
Karim Wade is the President's son. President Wade has been grooming him, these last few years, for the succession -- and also feeding him abundant opportunities to get very, very rich.
(I like Senegal, but yes, it is Africa.)
The really sad thing is, if the Senegalese I've met are typical -- probably not, but let's say -- then Wade Jr. has only the slimmest chance. He's widely disliked, and not respected at all. Too blatantly corrupt, too young, too cosmopolitan and international, lacks the gravitas of his father. The only way he might get in (it's said) is if the opposition is spectacularly selfish and incompetent, splintering so many ways that he makes it to the second round, then backstabbing each other until he takes the prize.
Otherwise, he's toast. In which case Wade Sr. has been wasting vast amounts of the country's patrimony trying to silkify a sow's ear.
Doug M.
Posted by: Doug M. | June 23, 2009 at 02:17 AM