webGuinée/IRIN News

Guinea: Road to ruin

Conakry, 20 October 2006 (IRIN) — The collapse of a bridge that provides the only link between N’Zerekore, a remote Guinean border town, and the capital, Conakry, has triggered higher prices for basic foods and transportation, further complicating the lives of impoverished Guineans.
The bridge, which collapsed in late August, was an essential crossing point on the only paved road linking Conakry on Guinea's western coast with Nzerekore, a major trading town 1,000 km southeast at the heart of the country's fertile Forest Region on the border with Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The situation further complicates life in Guinea, where more than half of the population scrapes by on less than $1 a day, according to the United Nations. In addition, there is no guarantee of stability. Ailing President Lansana Conte has no known succession plan, leading many analysts to warn of the potential for a military coup and chaos after his death.
The cutting of the road to Nzerekore is symbolic of Guinea's economic isolation and general deterioration, according to Nicola Prins in the Africa department of the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in London
“Their position is not very good. The economy is clearly deteriorating, economic policy has gone off track, and it has been that way for a long time,” she said. “The state of the infrastructure reflects their inability to get more funds to either improve or upgrade what they have. It's a rather bleak picture.”

Life getting harder

Aid agencies and NGOs working in Guinea have already set up their own private charter flights to get around the country, rather than risk the crumbling roads, which outside Conakry are frequently blocked. Earlier this month, UNHCR started scaling down its operations for Liberian refugees in Guinea, for reasons not related to the collapsed bridge.
Rampant inflation has already pushed the prices of most imported products on markets in Conakry out of reach for many people during the last year. The cost of a bag of rice rose to roughly $33 — equivalent to a civil servant's monthly salary.
Now prices for bananas and palm oil from the Forest Region are rocketing as the products become scarce, impacting on traders and families who rely on the cheaper, domestically produced food.
“When I see these prices going up and up, I ask myself how will I keep providing for my family,” said Moussa Kante, 42, the head of a family of seven in Conakry.
Since the collapse of the bridge, the cost of a ticket on one of the dilapidated yellow minibuses that plies the route between Conakry and Nzerekore has jumped from US $27 to US $36, while the journey time has quadrupled from 24 hours to four days.
“All the routes through the forest region have become difficult for us now because of the degradation,” said Abdoulaye Dioubate, a bus driver on the Conakry-Nzerekore route.
The rise in transport costs has had a knock-on impact on the getting kids into schools. The cost of school desks which are made near Nzerekore and distributed throughout Guinea has more than doubled since the bridge collapse from US $12.50 to $27, a roughly equivalent to the monthly salary of a school headmaster in Guinea.

State of deterioration

Ibrahima Kalil Kourouma, a government official at the ministry in charge of investment in roads, told IRIN that the government is US $50,000 short of the US $200,000 it estimates is needed to rebuild Conakry-Nzerekory road, and appealed to the European Union to dip into its development fund to help out.
But as Kourouma observed, "this disbursement depends on the improvement of good governance in Guinea."
Prins at the EIU said it is unlikely the EU or any of the other bilateral or multilateral donors that have helped prop up Guinea's struggling economy since the 1980s are going to help.

“The donors tend to tie economic and political reform together. Every once in a while the government gets back on track for a year or so in a fit of pro-reform efforts, and in between the donors release funds depending how government policy going, but it never lasts,” she said.

Meanwhile, the management of public funds is poor, Prins said.

“Every once in while they rein in spending long enough to get donor support, then completely let things go a year after,” he said. “The economy in general is in state of deterioration.”
“They have got to the point where, especially, multilateral agencies are sceptical of lending much more to Guinea. France is still willing to provide some funding, mostly because they don't want it to completely deteriorate,” Prins said.

Development aid to Guinea has been irregular since the International Monetary Fund cut ties with the country in 2002.
Guinea has extensive mineral reserves. High commodity prices have sparked an influx of mostly Russian and US companies keen to exploit Guinea's extensive bauxite reserves in the last 12 months, but analysts say it will be several years before the mines are filling government coffers in Conakry.