In a dramatic financial move, the World Bank Group has approved a staggering $200 million package to upgrade transport infrastructure and revive Togo’s struggling railway network. Official statements trumpet a vision of the country transformed into an “indispensable logistics hub” for the Sahel region. Yet beneath the technocratic veneer and customary handshakes, a pressing question emerges: how can a serious financial institution entrust such a strategic portfolio to a government whose economic governance is marked more by opacity than transparency?
By channeling hundreds of millions of dollars to a state that has yet to demonstrate fiscal discipline, the World Bank risks funding yet another logistical illusion.
The railway mirage and the reality of mismanagement
At the heart of the project lies an ambitious promise: rehabilitating the rail line connecting the Autonomous Port of Lomé to the Adétikopé Industrial Platform (PIA). On paper, shifting freight from road to rail to ease congestion in the capital is appealing. In Togo’s reality, the railway sector is a graveyard of abandoned infrastructure, weighed down for decades by chronic neglect and short-sighted political choices.
Entrusting such complex construction projects to Togo’s bureaucratic apparatus is a blind gamble. The country is regularly criticized for the slowness of its structural reforms and the inefficiency of its public investments. Handing over $200 million for rails without first ensuring that the administration has the skills, transparency, and rigor to manage them is putting the cart before the horse. At best, it is amateurism; at worst, a reward for poor governance.
Logistics hub or financial sieve?
Togo likes to imagine itself as the gateway to the Sahelian hinterland. But the reality of the Lomé-Ouagadougou-Niamey corridor is quite different: bureaucratic red tape, customs hassles, and, above all, systemic corruption that discourages economic operators. The Port of Lomé, despite its technical performance, remains at the center of corruption scandals and favoritism that remind us how porous the financial circuits are.
Injecting fresh money into infrastructure without cleaning up the business environment will solve nothing. As long as nepotism and the lack of political alternation freeze institutions, donor funds will first feed the power’s patronage networks before benefiting the real economy. By refusing to condition its subsidies on an uncompromising fight against embezzlement of public funds, the international community makes itself complicit in the country’s economic stagnation.
The willful blindness of international institutions
This sudden generosity from the World Bank raises questions about its own evaluation criteria. How can it justify such a blank check when the country faces glaring social emergencies—health, education, access to water—that are completely neglected by the national budget? The regime of Faure Gnassingbé excels at designing “showcase” projects to charm development partners while keeping the country in internal structural fragility.
This $200 million program will only weigh down Togo’s moral and financial debt, with no guarantee of a return on investment for the population. If Togo wants to be taken seriously on the international stage, it must first prove that it can manage its resources transparently. In the meantime, this funding looks very much like a blank check signed to a regime that has made resource capture a method of governance.
