Chapter 9 When is a Corridor Just a Road? Understanding Thwarted Ambitions Along the Abidjan–Lagos Corridor

To ask what is a transport corridor is not to pose an entirely facetious question. Most analysis proceeds on the assumption that we can infer what a corridor is from ‘its’ effects rather than by trying to define any intrinsic attributes. But there are countless roads that are not regarded as corridors, while almost all of the corridors are effectively labels placed upon routes that already existed – and often for a very long time.1 The same would hold mutatis mutandis for railways. One possible basis for a distinction might be that along designated corridors the roads are widened and the surfaces improved – processes of upgrading that are often associated with the interpolation of toll-booths – but this is not necessarily the case. In fact, there are stretches along all the main corridors in Africa that are severely potholed and in far worse shape than other national roads – as we will see below. So what serves to transform a mere road into something that is constitutive of a corridor? At the most fundamental level, a corridor exists when governments, donors and planners think it does, or should, exist. This obviously imparts a large measure of circularity to the exercise. But two other considerations that most analysts would regard as essential may instil a greater measure of rigour: firstly, whether a route connects two or more places that represent centres of particular importance – because of some combination of demography, strategic positioning or the location of natural resources – and, secondly, whether it carries unusually high levels of traffic. The Abidjan–Lagos Corridor (ALCo) evidently meets the first condition, given that the corridor links no fewer than five capital cities, namely Abidjan, Accra, Lomé, Cotonou and Lagos. However, the status of the second criterion is much more debatable. Whereas long-distance trucking along some of Africa’s other transport corridors – such as along the Northern Corridor in East Africa – is highly visible, this can hardly be said of ALCo. Although there are passenger vehicles that regularly ply the route, there is relatively little evidence of serious trucking. Revealingly, unlike in Southern and East Africa there are no real trucking companies that make their business from using the corridor on a sustained basis. At best one might say that ALCo is a developmental idea that is still under development.

Whether it emanates from mainstream economists or transport specialists, the literature on transport corridors tends to be at once technical and highly presentist. But a recent report from the Asian Development Bank factors in a much older history of transport corridors in South Asia, viewed through the prism of Mughal trade routes, the interventions of the East India Company and colonial railways – all of which (it is claimed) had a demonstrable impact on the regions through which they passed.1 World Bank, The Web of Transport Corridors in South Asia, Washington, D.C., 2018, pp. 27–48. These deeper histories are arguably well-worth excavating for different regions of Africa as well (see Soi in this volume). Between what is now Côte d’Ivoire and western Nigeria there is a string of coastal ports that have been in existence for a very long time. Although there was some trade and migration between the coastal settlements during the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the routes followed a broadly north–south orientation. Trading communities in the interior typically kept their options open, so that slaves and ivory would pass in one direction and cowries and manufactured goods in the other, depending on a number of factors that were operational at any given time: most notably, the level of physical security along the trade routes and the prevailing prices at the various ports.2 Paul Nugent, Boundaries, Communities and State-Making in West Africa: The Centrality of the Margins, Cambridge, 2019, ch. 2. Some of these routes from the interior to the coast provided the precedent for colonial roads and railways. In interesting ways, the Asante great roads remain etched into the contemporary landscape and some have subsequently been rebranded as corridors. But as for the littoral itself, the underlying pattern was one of active competition between coastal ports, which has an obvious echo in the present. The interpolation of colonial borders was associated with a contradictory double manoeuvre: that is, states constructed better roads along the coast to facilitate the export of cash crops and communications with the capital city – which was always located on the coast – but they also imposed taxes and restrictions on much of the trade that traversed borders. The net result was that coastal infrastructure was the composite of separate segments of road that had been constructed at different times to serve colonial, and later national, rather than regional or continental ends.

I will now look more closely at the level of correspondence between the way ALCo is depicted and what actually happens on the ground. Although it ought to be straightforward to get a fix on the corridor, in reality there is very little hard evidence to draw upon. The supporting data exists in fragments and mostly at a country level. The only real information for the corridor as a whole arises out of the collection of data on roadblocks and bribes by the now defunct West Africa Trade Hub and other data relating to border crossing and port dwell times. The problem is compounded by the fact that the various organisations that have been seeking to sell the idea of a development corridor have deployed statistics in a confusing manner. ALCO’s own information states that: ‘Around 27 million travellers, many of whom are traders and 140,000 truckers, each year use this service, which is lined with harbors, agro-industries, bus stations, major regional markets, places of transit for goods, border areas and parks. used vehicle sales. It concentrates 65 per cent of the economic activities of the region.’1 www.corridor-wa.org/index.php/en/presentation-alco [Accessed 19 March 2021].

The Abidjan–Lagos Corridor presents us with something of a paradox. The case for making substantial infrastructural investments is that ALCo is the ‘lung’ or the ‘beating heart’ of West Africa where most of the commerce of the region is transacted. But this is not reflected in the volume of traffic on the road or, more tellingly, in the ECOWAS trade statistics. And when governments invest in expansion of the ports, their focus is on maximising traffic along the north–south corridors to the Sahel. This means that governments in practice seek to retard the flow of goods along ALCo itself. The corridor does link no fewer than five capital cities, and many smaller urban centres. The vision that is increasingly articulated concerning the potential advantages of urbanism, in a context where the corridor provides the connective tissue, is certainly worthy of closer attention. But at the moment, using the corridor is prohibitively expensive for most businesses. Selling manufactured goods across one border is sustainable, but beyond that it often becomes financially perilous. In reality, the corridor as an economic space is constituted by two other sets of actors. The first is made up of countless smaller traders who deploy a system of relays to move fish, agricultural goods and other consumer items between markets in border regions that are often closely connected to each other. In so doing, they avoid much of the financial burden that comes with crossing multiple borders in a single journey. And the second is made up of the smugglers who are able to carve out a living by exploiting the differences in pricing and availability on either side of a particular border. Here the ironies abound. The first of these groups receives little treatment in the documents that justify ALCo as a target of investment, while the activities of the second provide the justification for ratcheting up surveillance and control measures that defeat the very purpose of the corridor. This is captured perfectly in the opening of an OSBP at Kraké-Seme, with a great deal of fanfare, only to be followed by the Nigerian decision to unilaterally close the border in August 2019. Maybe the dynamic will change in the coming years but, as things stand, ALCo remains a bundle of unresolved contradictions. Although the five member states formally rank the development of the east–west corridor as their foremost priority, their actions have so far demonstrated a rather weak commitment to the corridor in practice. The closure of land borders as a response to COVID-19, which unleashed none of the anguish that was witnessed in East and Southern Africa, has merely underlined how under-utilised ALCo really is. Although small traders were disadvantaged, larger manufacturers and transporters were remarkably accepting about the de facto closure of the entire corridor. Because the only real complaints issued from borderlanders, who could be dismissed as hardened smugglers, governments (especially that of Ghana) almost seemed to prefer this state of affairs. The disjuncture between the lofty rhetoric about the corridor and its practical disappearance could not have been greater than over 2020–2021. One is left wondering what Fela would have made of the ongoing ‘powershow’.