Anyone who knows Dakar will be familiar with this.



And this.



These same people will not be familiar with this.



The city has gone crazy. The Islamic Conference is coming and the President is convinced that Senegal's international reputation is at stake. And so it has spent millions of dollars on making the place pretty, planting hundreds of palm trees, building bridges and tunnels, some of them useful, most of them just big. Stadiums are ripped down, and pavement-hawkers like these will, I am sure, in the next few days just disappear.



The city is changing by the hour. At 4pm, someone might call to warn me off one road into town as it has been shut to build a roundabout. At 7pm, I will be driving on that same roundabout. Pavements are laid on sand in an afternoon, buildings are quite literally going up overnight. Bridges are built with no barriers or lights. It is power gone mad, foreign aid and investment wasted in the most disgusting way possible.

As my taxi man, Sow, said as we drove by a new mural which will no doubt have fallen off in 3 weeks:

"I can't afford to take my children to the hospital but at least we have pretty murals."

I can't understand why they didn't start building the roads a year ago. You literally can't build Rome in a day, but Senegal is trying very hard to do so. In a year these buildings and bridges will be falling down and Dakar will be back where it started, except it will be a hell of a lot uglier.