The Voie de Dégagement Nord 2 (VDN 2) is a major urban highway project designed to ease congestion and improve connectivity in Senegal. It is the kind of big infrastructural project that many leaders across Africa have used to highlight their commitment to economic and social transformation.
In The undulating capacity of the state, I use the efforts of the Senegalese government to construct the highway on the outskirts of Dakar between 2017 and 2022 as a lens through which to study the ability of African states to construct largescale infrastructure.
I show that the capacity of the Senegalese state to build VDN 2 rose and fell as it worked through various neighborhoods in Dakar. The state was able to construct segments of the highway with significant ease in the neighborhood of Parcelles Assainies but struggled to do so in the adjacent community of Cambérène, leading to significant delays and the over-running of budgets. This wave-like rising and falling of the ability of the state to undertake development work across these neighborhoods is what I refer to as “the undulating capacity of the state”.
The state’s ability to undertake development work, I argue, depends on the extent to which communities where it is intervening trust the state. Where they have significant trust in the state, they are more likely to embrace and support its work, facilitating project implementation. But in those communities where there is significant distrust of the state, community members are likely to create barriers to the work of the state, making it hard for the state to achieve its ends.
The central argument in The undulating capacity of the state is that proximate neighborhoods in the same city demonstrate significantly different levels of trust in the state. I argue that struggles over the ownership of and access to land going back to the creation of the state under colonial rule that have continued in the postcolonial era have shaped the extent to which various neighborhoods trust the state.
Neighborhoods that predated the creation of the state and see themselves as indigenous to these cities were the victims of extensive land expropriation by colonial and postcolonial states and this has created significant distrust in the state. In those neighborhoods largely populated by more recent migrants, the colonial and postcolonial states’ actual and hoped- for provision and guarantee of new rights to land in the city has created greater trust in the state.
The construction of the VDN 2 highway typifies the contradictions in the spate of infrastructure development that has marked the African continent since the turn of the 21st century. Beyond highways, states have constructed rail systems, seaports, dams, sport infrastructure, housing estates and whole new cities. Leaders have justified this investment in largescale infrastructure as critical for boosting economic growth, reducing poverty and promoting national and regional integration.
These efforts have received the support of important regional organizations such as the African Development Bank and the African Union, which sees such infrastructure development as key to the pursuit of the development goals outlined in its Agenda 2063: The Africa we Want.
In Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade who served as president from 2000 to 2012 commenced a spate of infrastructure development that succeeding leaders have continued with great zeal. Wade built the Corniche Ouest, VDN 1 and the Autoroute highways, the Musée des civilisations noires, the Grand théâtre national and the majestic Monument de la renaissance africaine. He also commenced work on a new international airport at Diass and began to construct a whole new city at Diamniadio.
Macky Sall, who succeeded Wade, completed the second and third phases of the VDN highway and continued work on the Autoroute à Péage, extending it to Mbour and connecting it to newly constructed highways to the cities of Thies and Touba. He finished work on the Aéroport international Blaise Diagne, continued work on the new city of Diamniadio and commenced work on the construction of a new deep seaport at Bargny. He also built the Train Express Régional, (TER) between Dakar and Diamniadio, and a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system in Dakar whose profile he thoroughly remade with the construction of multiple flyovers in his Projet de construction de 18 ponts et autoponts.
Such largescale infrastructure projects suggest that African states do not entirely lack an interest in and capacity for development as is suggested by some scholars, journalists and commentators. The anticipation of future needs in a continent with a galloping population, which informs many of these projects also suggests attention to long-term planning, which is critical to the process of development.
Unfortunately, this era of infrastructure development also raises some familiar concerns about the African state and its involvement in development work. Some critics have questioned whether scarce resources are being spent on the most important priorities or used to construct white elephants that are only meant to boost leaders’ electoral fortunes in Africa’s democracies. Massive borrowing to fund these projects has raised the specter of over-indebtedness.
Importantly, these costs have not always resulted in completed and well-functioning infrastructure. As seen in the case of the VDN 2 in Senegal, many projects are started only for them to be subjected to long delays and paused for extended periods. Some are even jettisoned altogether or completed but kept under exploited and sometimes even left entirely unused.
The undulating capacity of the state calls attention to the continuing importance of histories of land expropriation and redistribution by colonial and postcolonial states in shaping development outcomes, including infrastructure development, today.
Recommendations by development agencies and scholars to make largescale infrastructure projects more successful often focus on greater involvement of communities in project design and implementation, better and more transparent planning and accounting and enhanced benefits for local communities from these projects.
I show that while these recommendations are laudatory, they are often myopic in regarding these projects as neatly bounded interventions. Often, they do not address more deep-seated and broader questions of social justice within which these projects take place and through which communities make sense of them.
The undulating capacity of the state thus suggests a need for broader conversations and efforts to revisit and address important historically rooted questions of social justice as part of efforts at promoting development.
Ato Onoma is a professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto
