Lowered expectations for Ghana's Hope City?
- By: Christopher Vourlias | Aljazeera
- Apr 22, 2015
- 2 min read
It began with a groundbreaking ceremony led by the president, followed by a lavish launch party at the national stadium that featured a performance by American R&B star Chris Brown. On the eve of the country’s independence day in 2013, Ghanaian developers announced their plans to build a $10 billion tech hub on the outskirts of the capital. Even the name they chose for the project, Hope City, underscored ambitions to once again make Ghana — the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to achieve independence — a beacon for the rest of the continent.
Two years later, though, construction on Hope City has yet to begin. The project’s Italian architects have gone back to the drawing board to redesign their blueprints. The CEO of home-grown tech company RLG Communications, Roland Agambire, who is Hope City’s driving force, has been caught up in high-profile scandals. And a protracted economic downturn in Ghana, which has led to crippling power cuts and a steep slide in the value of the Ghanaian cedi, has made some question whether such an ambitious project will even get off the ground.
“Hope City is dead,” said one tech industry analyst, who requested anonymity because of the politically sensitive nature of the project. “There’s no hope.”
The trials of Hope City — which, its developers maintain, will someday rise over this West African metropolis — offer a telling case study at a time when similar splashy, multibillion-dollar developments are rising across the continent. Growing Internet technology sectors, fueled by a mobile phone boom, are spurring hopes that African economies long dependent on natural resources and foreign aid can drive growth through skilled industries harnessing local capital instead. But as African governments and real estate developers begin casting those ambitions in steel and glass, critics wonder whether the sky-high hopes surrounding these projects might be brought back down to earth.
When President John Mahama broke ground at the 2013 ceremony for Hope City, he had reason to be optimistic. Buoyed by the discovery of oil in 2007, Ghana already boasted one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, its GDP averaging nearly 8 percent growth per year for a decade. A history of political stability fueled hopes that the country might be able to avoid the resource curse that plagued so many other African nations. And in 2011, the World Bank declared that Ghana, its economy growing by 15 percent, had officially achieved middle-income status.
For Agambire, Hope City was the latest venture in his meteoric rise as an entrepreneur who started with a single Internet café in 2002 and grew it to become one of the country’s leading tech companies. The story of RLG, which bills itself as “the first indigenous African company to assemble laptops, desktops, and mobile phones,” and has in recent years expanded into Gambia and Nigeria, seemed to be a fitting symbol for the country’s recent boom.
Source: America.aljazeera.com
By: Christopher Vourlias @postcardjunky
