From Road to Infrastructure

What a difference a couple of years can make. When I first came to Accra in 2010, I regularly travelled through a highway construction zone. It was a fascinating mess. Huge piles of red dirt, scaffolding made from wood, construction workers wandering up and down without safety harnesses, the only concession to the dangers of such work being the occasional hard hat. This was a highway to nowhere that abruptly stopped.

But there was, towering over the construction site, an enormous billboard acknowledging the wonderful US Millennium Challenge Fund that was helping to pay for the highway construction. Last year, I passed through the same intersection, with the construction finished and the highway filled with hurtling traffic and honking horns. Still towering over was the Millennium Challenge sign.

Today, on the way to work, crossing that very intersection, lo and behold, there was the sign, this time just a hulking empty skeleton of a billboard, providing the ghost of a memory of previous gratitude, while oblivious drivers speed off in all directions. But…  maybe memory and gratitude are more enduring and just a little twisted. Suddenly, I noticed another sign, small, at the side of the highway, informing me that this is now the George Walker Bush Motorway. 

So, from the highway to nowhere in 2010, the Millennium debt is now paid in perpetuity. George Walker Bush Motorway.