Chapter 7 Privatising the Port: Harbouring Neoliberalism in Lomé

The micro-nation of Togo is one of the poorest countries in the world. Situated on the Gulf of Guinea, Togo’s coastline is a mere 56 kilometres long. It is one of the smallest countries on the African continent, a narrow strip that stretches roughly 560 kilometres north from the coast to Burkina Faso with a population of approximately eight million. What is more, its highly protected national labour code would imply that Togo is an unattractive locale for global capital. How has this marginal place become a site of one of West Africa’s leading transshipment container ports? Why is Togo so attractive to global (maritime) capital despite its lack of natural resources? And what makes Togo an ‘investment destination’ for new infrastructures of trade and transportation - a logistics and maritime hub at the core of a new transport corridor – notwithstanding regional competition from the ports of Tema and Cotonou, national unions and the propensity for labour to strike?

In Togolese popular discourse, the media, the milieu of national and expat port professionals, as well as scholarly work, four existing species of explanations- ecological, geographical, global financial and political economic - describe the phenomenon of the port’s success.

Perhaps the most common explanation given by World Bank technocrats, the Togolese Port Authority, the media and Togolese citizens that accounts for the success of the Lomé port concerns its naturalness. “Our port is the only natural deep-water seaport on the coast between Senegal and Angola”, said the head of the port authority’s communications department, to an audience of Burkinabe traders visiting the harbour in August 2017. “Other ports need expensive dredging if they want to berth bigger ships with more cargo”, he continued with no uncertain pride, “but our port is the only port in the region that can handle the new megaships”. The port authority’s ecological explanation for being the first container port in West Africa is echoed by the private corporations that operate the two container terminals, the press, as well as ordinary Togolese. For example, an expatriate manager explained to me that a key reason for investing in Togo was indeed techno-ecological: “The natural draft is 14 metres, we only had to dredge minimally.” Similar explanations on the implication of the deep water can be found both in the local and international press: ‘Lomé, the first container port in West Africa… the only natural deep-water port in the region, and currently the only port capable of handling the third generation of cargo ships’.1 Nadoun Coulibaly, ‘Togo: Une Plateforme Logistique pour Désengorger le Port de Lomé’, Jeune Afrique, 11 June 2019 <www.jeuneafrique.com/mag/786032/economie/togo-une-plateforme-logistique-pour-desengorger-le-port-de-lome/>. It also features in World Bank reports and feasibility studies. For the technocrat, the media, the professional and the port bureaucrat, the techno-ecological explanation was one of the critical reasons the port is significant today.

If the small size of a country has the capacity to naturalise the intrinsic nature of Togo, its geographical position places it strategically in the West African region. ‘Togo, the Gateway to West Africa’, is a slogan the government frequently uses to advertise Togo’s strategic location to, and in, the world. One such mise en scène of the port’s geographic advantage was the African Union’s maritime summit, recently held in Togo; here the harbour was presented as ‘the only port on the West African coast from which you can get to several capitals in one day’.2 ‘Protect Our Oceans’ Summit, Lomé, Togo, 15 October 2016 <www.african-union-togo2015.com/en/togo/opportunites>.

A French financial director with a decade-long experience in the African maritime sector explained the Lomé port phenomenon to me by way of its financialisation. Because port infrastructures are especially capital intensive, there is a great deal at stake, not least in relation to how multinational corporations assemble financial capital for maritime investments. “Corporations hate government backed loan arrangements in developing countries”, he began to explain. For him, the financial capital that foreign corporations had effectively mobilised and drawn into the privatised concessions of the Togo port was the quintessential example of how to create the possibility of a magnet effect. Each of the three corporations that had obtained the operating rights to the concessions for 30 plus years – namely, the Swiss terminal operator TIL, the French group Bolloré Africa Logistics, and the Spanish maritime group Boluda - used a distinct financial model. TIL utilised multilateral financial institutions and development banks for the construction and commercial exploitation of Lomé Container Terminal (LCT); later, it also drew on Chinese corporate state capital. Bolloré, by contrast, used its own corporate holding to finance the infrastructural and logistical upgrading of Togo Terminal (TT). Finally, the tugboat operator Boluda used a mix of corporate and commercial capital to acquire the operating rights for its lucrative concession. For the maritime finance expert it was the confluence of these three models of port finance that made Lomé a success.4 Whether these three models were developed in this specific context, which would suggest that Lomé was precisely their experiential ground, is an open question.

From an analytical perspective, the most significant explanation of the port’s success is the political economic story. While other accounts merely offer functional explanations, the political economic account exceeds in importance, not least because it has different dimensions. Firstly, it concerns the retraction of the state and the political vacuum; secondly, it has to do with the privatisation of the port; and, thirdly, it relates to the discourse of informal transactions.

From the perspective of those Togolese who have long worked in the port system, the transformation of the harbour has to do with the neoliberal moment: “Before they liberalised the port, there was solidarity and hierarchy: it was Togolese and we worked together”, summarised the driver of a medium-sized logistics company. The freight-forwarding company he worked for was one of the few that had maintained national ownership in the aftermath of the crisis of the state – that critical moment of the 1990s when non-state actors stepped into the political void of state retraction.7 Charles Piot, Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War, Chicago, 2010. In fact, his company was created in the early 1990s, at a time when a strike had paralysed the port for almost a year amidst political crisis and state violence. As ships abandoned the harbour and the port city was emptied of its residents (fleeing the army’s attack on an interim government that had temporarily stripped the president-dictator of its power), Eyadéma incentivised citizens to recapture port activity. Today, his company struggled to maintain its position in a market increasingly dominated by international corporations. “In the past”, he further explained “it was buzzing, there was work, lots of it, but now? the multinationals have taken over.” The view of this driver, who, like many, had seen his livelihood diminished and threatened in contradistinction to the promise of democracy and liberalisation, was reflected by many in the maritime industry (private sector and public employees, low-wage earners and top managers alike).

Another explanation is given from a scholarly perspective, the view of organic intellectuals and global technocrats. For Beatrice Hibou,14 Beatrice Hibou, ‘From Privatising the Economy to Privatising the State’, in B. Hibou (ed.), Privatising the State, New York, 2004, pp. 1–46 privatisation is the dialectical complement of the retraction of the state and the political vacuum. This, of course, is a cherished argument that World Bank technocrats have long advanced as they pushed African governments into modernising their outdated (or ‘failing’) port infrastructures. The need for privatisation was confirmed by many Togolese in the port system. Consider a supervisor at Lomé Container Terminal who acknowledged the benefit of privatisation: “The port had to be modernised, it was all falling apart… we badly needed the investment to privatise… the state is incapable of running the port, it was completely dysfunctional.” The managing director of a tug boat company echoed the supervisor’s view by confirming the port’s operating deficit: “When we obtained the concession for managing the port’s towage and mooring services in 2017, it was operating at a loss.” One of the tug boat captains, a Togolese who had previously worked for the state-run towage service added critical nuance as he spoke about the lack of maintenance and theft that had made what should be a highly lucrative business into a deficient operation: “The tugboats weren’t properly serviced … engines would break down and spare parts were often unavailable and required a lengthy bureaucratic process to order.” A high-ranking employee at the port authority agreed with the captain’s assessment: “One day, we caught a guy with his zemidjan (taxi-moto) filling his empty tank from the tug boat’s gasoline container! We fired him. But there are many other instances, and that’s why things weren’t working before the harbour was privatised.” Still, another praised the competition and alleged efficiency that privatisation brings to the Togo port sector: “African governance is not conducive to port efficiency”, said this Togolese private sector employee. For him, ‘African governance’ ought to be replaced by corporate governance, namely its alleged structure of accountability (i.e. structures that he considered incompatible with the former).

Some see informal transactions as an important variable that can facilitate the success of a port. There are two dimensions to the discourse of informal transactions: firstly, informal transactions understood as informal economy (ordinary licit informal transactions), and, secondly, informal transactions understood as bribery and corruption (illicit informal transaction).15 On the renaming of the illicit in the context of law laundering, see John L. and Jean Comaroff, ‘Law and Disorder in the Postcolony: An Introduction’, in J. L and J. Comaroff (eds), Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, Chicago, 2006, pp. 1–56. Both occur, and both are said to spark and energise economies. Discursively these two are fused but analytically they are of course separate. An accountant at a logistics company claimed that most companies in Togo, foreign and national, have special accounts for what he called “extra expenses”. Such expenses, or informal transactions, can range from the transfer of monies to the ruling party during elections, sending beverages for the annual Evela wrestling contest in the northern city of Kara (the birthplace of the Gnassingbé ‘clan’), paying off union leaders for settling labour resistances, to paying bribes to win bids for port concessions. In the port, he suggested, such informal transactions are widely enacted if they do not constitute the norm: “Everyone knows about Bolloré mingling in our 2010 election … we know for a fact that the president has a 20 per cent share in Togo Terminal [i.e. Bolloré]”, he exclaimed without the slightest hint of hesitation. What this accountant described is often thought of as corruption (indeed, in 2018, French industrial magnate Vincent Bolloré was arrested in Paris over corruption charges in the acquisition of container terminals in the ports of Lomé and Conakry). But, from the perspective of capital it is thought of as the ordinary cost of business. According to this corporate argument, the ordinary cost of business (i.e. corruption taken as illegitimate distribution) actually facilitates the port as a highly successful operation. If there were no such costs, it would be much harder for corporations like Bolloré to get labour to do what it wants, or, for that matter, to get government licences when needed.

The harbour’s natural deep seawater characteristic is a necessary condition for the port to have achieved its current glory. Lomé is the only natural deep-water harbour with a draft of 16.6 metres, which places it ahead of its immediate competitors, specifically the neighbouring ports of Cotonou (Benin) and Tema (Ghana). Indeed, some of the large container ships that use the Lomé port simply cannot enter its Benin counterpart; still, others are constrained to stay at anchorage off the coast until the port’s access channel becomes navigable with tidal changes.

Government and corporate discourse ascribe the Togo port phenomenon to its strategic geographical position. Indeed, the geographic explanation also constitutes a necessary condition but it is not a sufficient one. For sure, Lomé is geographically well positioned at the core of critical coastal and hinterland transport corridors: namely, the Abidjan–Lagos Corridor, the Lomé–Ouagadougou Corridor, and the Lomé–Niamey Corridor. But there is much competition between ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) member states over the control of trade with Sahelian countries.5 Paul Nugeent, ‘Africa’s Re-Enchantment with Big Infrastructure: White Elephants Dancing in Virtuous Circles?’, in J. Schubert, U. Engel and E. Macamo (eds), Extractive Industries and Changing State Dynamics in Africa: Beyond the Resource Curse, London & New York, 2018, pp. 22–40. For example, the Niger mining industry depends especially on the Cotonou transport corridor, whereas Burkina Faso relies on both the corridors of Lomé and Tema. But Lomé, unlike Abidjan, does not have a railway connection to Ouagadougou despite recent governmental efforts to attract investors for the 760-kilometre railway project (Lomé–Cinkassé).6 On the Togo railway project, see Togo Invest <https://togoinvest.tg/en/the-projects/rail-project/>. Similarly, Ghana is expected to begin the Eastern Railway line project that will link coastal ports to inland dry ports.7 For details on Ghana’s Eastern Railway, see <https://dailyguidenetwork.com/2–2bn-eastern-railway-project-ready-to-take-off/>.

The resort to global finance and foreign direct investment in port infrastructure and technology was both critical and necessary to the harbour’s success. Global finance is irrefutably a necessary condition, but its capacity to act as a magnet effect would be much less effective in a political context where the state looms large in the economy of the port. For foreign direct investment to be as effective as it has been in Togo requires an eviscerated state that provides free range to capital, namely attractive tax, property and investment codes. But the Togolese state is not entirely withdrawn, much to the dismay of corporations. Indeed, the foreign companies that operate the port have complained about the restrictiveness of labour laws and residence regulations.

The political economic explanation is the most viable of the four species of explanations because it gestures towards a new political moment under neoliberalism. What is more, the three elements of political economy capture the structural aspects of the postcolonial past in the neoliberal present.

There is evidence that before the state withdrew from the management of the port, its structure was less rhizomatic: “There was a system in place, a system with clear hierarchies, but now?” lamented a high-ranking customs officer with 20 years of experience in the old state-centric port. Indeed, the work of customs has increasingly been outsourced to non-state entities from cargo scanning to GPS tracking technologies. As container movement is securitised through satellite vehicle tracking systems, technologies of logistics slip into an instrument of privatised governance à la Mbembe.9 In her pioneering 2010 work on cargo inspection at Tema port, ‘Recasting Maritime Governance in Ghana’, Brenda Chalfin has powerfully shown how a process of public knowledge making has morphed into a process of enclosure. Thus, with the deinstitutionalisation of the state and state sovereignty, corporate capital has inserted itself into the political void of the state, effectively paving the way for capital to experiment. Its effects were acutely felt by those working in the private port sector. Freight forwarders and transport union members were worried about the future of their businesses, which had long generated reliable returns. Now, they feared being sidelined by the foreign logistics companies that private terminal operators privileged, had stakes in, if they did not own them altogether.

It is common cause for those working in the harbour system to attribute the transformation of the port to its radical privatisation: “They sold our port”, said a retired employee of a shipping agency. While some agreed that the port had to be privatised, namely because its dated infrastructure required the kind of financial investments the port authority was unable to generate, others were suspicious about the way this had occurred. Still, others were angry that the authorities had not managed the port properly. In short, there is ample evidence that Togolese were ambivalent about the port’s success; they questioned who was benefiting from its makeover, not least because some Togolese port businesses were receiving less, instead of more, cargo. In effect, their assessment captured the apparent contradiction of the port’s success: How could Lomé be at once West Africa’s first transshipment container port - as per the standard measure for containerised cargo, the twenty-foot Equivalent Unit (TEU) - with the highest regional cargo throughput, yet have less domestic cargo to transact in?

If secondary order costs were seen to have enabled the control of the private in the same of the public, they are also the result of the end of the longue durée of privatisation. As new forms of capital management were rationalised as ways of tackling the port’s inefficiency, private indirect governance was met with both suspicion and critique. The Togolese press had long reported on port mismanagement, including the embezzling of public funds: from stories of port monies going into private bank accounts of politically-connected businessmen, illicit payments to shadow companies, the over-invoicing of port services to the explosive uncovering of the Bolloré corruption scandal. But does this narrative of illegitimate, yet necessary or otherwise economically productive, distribution amount to a convincing account of its historical workings? To wit, the political-economic explanation of the port’s transformation has multiple dimensions. While in Togo the state was never a Keynesian social-democratic state per se – i.e. not a metropolitan state but rather a (post/colonial) ‘state sans nation’10 John L. Comaroff, ‘Reflections on the Colonial State, in South Africa and Elsewhere: Factions, Fragments, Facts and Fictions’, Social Identities 4:3, 1998, p. 346. – its tendency to reverse from a function of the state collecting private funds for the collective good to one in which it distributes public funds to the private sector, is nonetheless significant.11 Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, The Truth About Crime, Chicago, 2016. In sum, changes in state function at this new political moment under neoliberalism - whence the state is no longer the sole sovereign - enabled the privatisation of the port and, hence, its ultimate success. To fully grasp how these changes came about requires historicising the present moment of privatised/neoliberal port governance.

It is no historical accident that Lomé harbour has become a major transshipment port on the African continent. Since its colonial inception, Togo has been a particularly effective economic frontier zone extracting value from its borders. In fact, it was the lucrative contraband trade with the British Gold Coast that gave rise to the Lomé port-city, which, until the late nineteenth century, was little more than a fishing village.1 From 1884 to 1914, Togo was a protectorate of the German empire. For an excellent discussion of the history of the Togo–Ghana contraband trade, see Paul Nugent, Smugglers, Secessionists and Loyal Citizens on the Ghana–Togo Frontier, Athens, 2002; for an analysis of the production and circulation of Dutch genever (gin) and German schnaps on the Guinea coast, particularly in precolonial Ghana, see Emmanuel Akyeampong, Drink, Power and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c. 1800 to Recent Times, Oxford, 1996. By the early twentieth century, Lomé and its roadstead port became the centre of colonial capitalism.2 The first German wharf was destroyed by a storm soon after its inauguration in 1900. By 1904, a metallic pier had replaced its wooden predecessor. Conceived by imperial civil engineers and built by forced labour, the last vestiges of the metallic pier – that German colonial relic par excellence – are still visible today. In fact, a nearby beach bar, Le Wharf Allemand, carries its name. Popular among Loméans who enjoy spending Sunday afternoons at the beach, the bar offers views of the German foundation, as well as the adjacent, more visible, structure of the French wharf. The latter was used until 1968 when the current port was inaugurated. While Togolese hold highly critical views of the French today, the German era, surprisingly, holds nostalgic currency in the Togolese imagination; this, despite Germany having used the local population as a source of both forced labour and tax revenue. For a detailed history of the German era, including a discussion of the wharf, see Peter Sebald, Togo 1884–1914 Eine Geschichte der Deutschen ‘Musterkolonie’ auf der Grundlage Amtlicher Quellen, Berlin, 1988. The administration of German Togoland ran an effective logistical operation from the Lomé deep-water pier where steam cranes and railway tracks handled the bulk of the Musterkolonie (model colony) trade economy.3 Bearing the traces of a crude history of colonial exploitation and forced labour, the old Prussian railway system eventually connected the pier to Aného, the initial capital of the German protectorate. Located roughly 45 kilometres east of Lomé, Aného was the centre of the booming palm oil trade that German traders had come to control once they had sidelined the powerful trading clans of the coast. See Nicoué Lodjou Gayibor, ‘Histoire des togolais, des origines à 1884’, Presses UB, Lomé 1 (1997), 13–68; Sebald, Togo 1884–1914. With the emergence of Lomé as the new commercial centre of German Togoland, steamship liners abandoned the Aného surf port. The latter was located off the shores of Aného, which meant that goods had to be transferred from the steamer on to smaller pirogues for coastal transport across the dangerous surf. This process was not only dangerous and time-consuming, but it also led to the loss of merchandise and people (further railway lines were built by Prussian engineers to transport cotton, rubber and cocoa). Not surprisingly, the Lomé wharf was the only port structure on the Gulf of Guinea that imported twice as much as it exported.4 Nicoué Lodjou Gayibor, ‘Histoire des togolais, des origines à 1884’, Presses UB, Lomé 1 (1997).

Why did Lomé become this successful port despite the odds of being located in one of the poorest and smallest countries in the world? What is more, why should this have happened in the first place? The answer to these questions has to do with the specific history of how global capital/ism has re/made Lomé harbour from its edges. And there is an important comparative point to be made about the way the story of Togo harbour (hence privatised port governance) fits into global patterns of how capital is shaping and securing port and transportation infrastructure elsewhere.