A Short Return to Addis

It was exactly seven years to the week that I was back in Addis for a few days. Last time round there were meetings here and there, lots of walking, some light rail, continuous tussles with internet access, mille-feuilles and cortados at Kaldi’s coffee, hunts for fabled “best Chinese food” on the continent (courtesy burgeoning Chinese presence)…

And then there was load-shedding. Multiple days when the city was mostly pitch black, with patches of diesel-powered bright spots.

So when this time we landed in dazzling brightness, were put up in a shiny new hotel, conferenced in a glitzy new venue, traveled up and down on new “planned” roads (with bike lanes and pedestrian pathways—more on this later) and through new facades made to look stylishly old with a layer of stony-tiling, something didn’t seem to add up. The official self-praise, and adulation of powers-that-be, seemed to be getting lapped up by everyone at the conference.

The rhetoric of “we are spending billions upgrading our city” to “we are now the Paris of Africa” to “Addis will act as an engine of growth for Ethiopia and eastern Africa” all seemed to signal that Addis, Ethiopia, and their leaders have solved urbanisation.

…

Nothing to see here, move along now.

…

But a little exploration outside of the official convoys that ferried participants to and from the hotel/venue very quickly peeled the layers from the picture that was painted for us. It felt almost like a palimpsest written with washable ink. And ironically, it took one bout of rainfall to wash it all away.

First visible signs appeared on day 2, when there was an extended shower in the evening. It all began with the internet (iffy to begin with given the overextended demand for data connectivity) crashing at the venue. And then when we started packing up, we saw that all the snazzy new streets that the convoy had been through on day 1 (stopping for photo opportunities even) were waterlogged. There were city workers toiling away with mops and whatnots redirecting water into (storm water) drains. Amid flashbacks from Bangalore’s white topping and tender-sure adventures, I couldn’t stop but marvel at how urban design fails so spectacularly to account for nature. A hilly city cannot and should not get waterlogged if proper design is implemented. But alas, all-that-snazz and wanting to be Paris trumps our southern contexts.

In the evening, as we were heading back to the hotel on brightly lit streets in our convoy with BMW-riding policemen parting the Red Sea of peak hour Addis traffic, there were some signs that just beyond the roads we were on, and the building facades facing the road, all was not right. The familiar loadshedding-esque darkness seemed to beckon from only one street away.

…

Then day 3 proceeded to peel away the last layers of ink.

Inducing my colleagues to walk downhill from the venue towards the centre of town, the first signs of rushed construction and poor design started appearing. Walking back to the hotel later in the evening, the sights were more prominent. Bicycle lanes and pedestrian pathways were not contiguous—obvious land acquisition problems. In one place, the Portuguese embassy’s walls reached right up to the road, creating a cliff of sorts that pedestrians had to get across by jumping onto the traffic area.

Zebra crossings were not the most logical—in many places much further behind the stop line for vehicles at intersections. Many exposed pipelines and access points. Rubberised cycle tracks and anti-slip tiles for pedestrian paths, but slippery marble-ish tactiles. And haphazard steps with steep steep slopes that no mobility-challenged individual would be able to use.

In between all this, the presence of a large police force, apparently dedicated to keep pedestrians off the cycle tracks and motor lanes, didn’t help the incomplete design. The standard global South theme of motor-vehicle-primacy played through here as well. Pedestrians, after all, only exist because they are poor and can’t afford cars.

All this signaled a rush job for appearances. Let those foreign visitors who take one straight road from the airport to the fancy hotel(s) to the government district in air-conditioned cars, many-a-times with police escort see how great the city is. …

Cue flashbacks to dignitaries visiting Delhi.

…

To be fair, all this could be overlooked as signs of a city under construction. But there’s also the obvious pulling-a-fast-one. None of these flaws and signs of incompleteness are visible when zipping by in cars or convoys. These can only be experienced in person. And the bet is obviously on bigwigs never actually seeing the ground reality.

…

And then we met some urban(e) colleagues, and more stories started tumbling out. The light rail network which was in the late 2010s being touted as a case study of what a low-cost high-capacity rapid transport system could look like in congested urban centres (e.g., indian cities that were suddenly waking up to the promised utopia that metro systems supposedly provided) was all but given up on. Running on fumes as it were. This was quite visible moments later while we sat for a coffee and pastry (not at Kaldi’s, but at a new chic cafe in the stony-facaded-city-centre)—the elevated line which had four car trains every five minutes in 2017, were operating two car trains, more than 15 minutes apart. Later that day, walking along the at-grade route, I was taken aback at how few people were using the trains—seven years back, it was difficult to get in.

…

At least the mille-feuilles were still fabulous.

…

While the streets we traversed to and from the venue were glowing bright, visiting off-main-road locations presented a different story. Electricity supply was suspended since the showers we experienced on day 2. More than 24 hours at that point. Later that evening when I walked back to the hotel, I encountered a two-truck, four-tanker convoy refilling our hotel’s fuel tanks that feed the generators. A 1,000+ roomed hotel running on diesel.

Then there were stories of forced relocation from the city centre. The officials termed it temporary (same old global South “redevelopment” story); citizens painted it differently (same old global South “redevelopment” story). A colleague whose family ran businesses in the historical piazza area were forced to relocate a couple of years back—they were apparently the fortunate ones, having the wherewithal to relocate to the upcoming Sheger City in the periphery of Addis. It appears that residents of the neighbourhoods (some informal) were not so lucky. Some apparently got just days to move out before the city razed their areas for the shiny new vision to be implemented.

…

Of course, there is the political economy story to this. The current government needs to pivot from old (failing) coalitions towards an economy that accommodates the youth’s aspirations. What better way than to build shiny new cities and urban-scapes—after all cities are engines of development, no? Direct application of textbook urban and regional planning concepts abound—develop corridors, attract investments, industrial and commercial clusters form, trickle down benefits will accrue. Even the forced relocation of inner city dwellers fits in the 19th century Hausmann model of Paris—but at that time, those being relocated, were also being forced into blue collar jobs, courtesy the industrial growth in the peripheries. Now it isn’t very clear—is industrialisation actually happening?

For the sustainability fix, why not ban import and sale of all petrol/diesel cars and two wheelers. For quick greening, why not plant exotic non-native species. …

Speed is of the essence.

…

And then some more questions emerge: where is the money coming from? What happens to all the two wheelers that have been banned in the city? What happened to all the green spaces from before? Unfortunately, ask no questions, get no lies, seems to be the mantra.

…

I did ask one question though. After two days of not seeing the earlier ubiquitous yellow and black logo of Kaldi’s coffee, I asked where they were. One person said that the new city is too expensive for the chain and they are only in the peripheries now (and that said person still has his morning coffee at one before boarding a bus to his office). Another said that you will still find them, but the city government is deciding on branding/logos/colours/etc. for all companies that are operating in the new city, so the signages are probably not cleared yet, and hence in all probability they are operating sign-less. Like many other firms and businesses.

Go figure.