Build $6bn ‘Wakanda’ city or we’ll take the land, Senegal warns singer

It takes some effort to look at a field in Senegal where livestock graze around a concrete arch and imagine twisting skyscrapers in a futuristic city that runs on its own cryptocurrency.
Four years after the singer-songwriter Akon laid the foundation stone of a $6 billion eponymous development, the site has been claimed by cows and goats. Senegal’s government and would-be residents of the promised Akon City worry that the plan, inspired by the fictitious technologically advanced kingdom in the Marvel film Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, is looking more like Wakanda never.
The R&B star, 51, who has sold more than 35 million albums worldwide, has now been given an ultimatum to get on with his promised “beacon of innovation and human development” or lose the land the authorities granted him.
Phase one, which included homes, a hospital, a school, a police station and solar power plant, was due to be completed in 2023, and the whole city by 2030 on a 136-acre site that includes Mbodiene village, 60 miles south of Senegal’s capital Dakar.
“It would have had a great impact on many lives here where there are many young people who do not have a job,” said Mame Lamp Fall, a 40-year-old community leader, who has had no explanation about why so little has come of the plan.
Artist impressions of skyscrapers soaring above the rural landscape, film studios, a marina and university — underpinned by the Akoin cryptocurrency — dangled opportunities that were difficult to imagine. To date, a youth centre, a basketball court and an information centre have been handed over.
After having had such high hopes, Félix Sene, 27, is tempted to leave the country rather than stay in “dead” Mbodiene. Four in ten of Senegal’s 16 million people live below the poverty line, according to World Bank data.
“This Akon City project had given us hope for better days here and now we have to figure out what to do with our lives,” Sene, who is unemployed, told The Times.
Born Aliaune Thiam in America, Akon spent his childhood in Senegal and became famous from the early 2000s with hits such as Smack That and band collaborations with, among others, Snoop Dogg and Eminem.
On the back of his musical success, Akon turned his attention towards having “some kind of power to make decisions in Africa”, he told CNN in 2020. The scale and ambition of his Akon City vision drew scepticism in Senegal and beyond.
The project’s estimated costs were not much shy of Senegal’s overall annual budget in 2020, yet Akon managed to persuade the president at the time, Macky Sall, that he was the man to make it happen.
Shortly after Akon launched his plans for Senegal, he announced a second Akon City for Uganda where, in 2021, President Museveni allocated him land.
In the same year, Akon was sued for $4 million by his business partner Devyne Stephens who claimed he was owed money from the Senegal project which, Stephens’ lawyers said, exhibited “many of the trademark characteristics … of fraudulent business ventures such as Ponzi schemes and pyramid schemes”. Akon settled part of the lawsuit out of court.
Cheick Seck, a project manager at Axiome Construction in Dakar, recently told reporters that “Akon City is happening”. A visit to the site by Akon himself is promised so he can personally give reassurances that with new investors and architects on board, the first phase will be done by 2028, and the project will be finished by 2035.
Sapco-Senegal, the state-owned body responsible for developing Senegal’s tourism areas, has given Akon formal notice to start work on his project or the government will take back 90 per cent of the land granted to him, Serigne Mboup, Sapco’s director general, said.
The Times has approached Akon for comment.
In Mbodiene, André Sarr, 51, a former hotel worker who now farms, remained optimistic.
“The authorities want to take back the land, but for what use?” he asked. “We do not want them to take it back from Akon, we trust that he will build the city he promised if they give him time. He has only built one house that is yet to be finished but it’s a start. He will get there, we have not lost hope on him or his project.”