Infrastructure: The Cost of Weak Foundations

We often debate a lot about the state of infrastructure in the United States and how terrible, or in some places, good, it is. Those of you who live in NH or ME are spoiled in a lot of ways. There are really only a handful of primary roadways in NH and only one main highway in Maine, all of which are easy enough to maintain with the amount of money collected at tolls. But that’s not the way it is in other parts of the United States and certainly not the way it is here in Madagascar. It may seem boring, but let me tell you about the infrastructure problems that many developing nations encounter around the world. I’ll break it down into three categories; roadways, electricity, and water.

Now before I go into it, I could summarize most of Madagascar’s problems, I estimate 80% of them with no scientific or econometric data to support my claim, to a single word. Corruption. Corruption plays a major role in most of the developing world’s slow economic growth and plateauing standards of living. It’s a subject for another day, but suffice it to say that a lot of money is wasted in a complex channel of corruption and selfishness, all of which ultimately impact the essential and fundamental building blocks of a well-functioning economic system grounded in trade and markets. The best example is, of course, lack of infrastructure.

Let me start with roads. The roads in Madagascar are like that old laptop you refuse to throw out or replace. It’s old, beat up, and barely functions. It’s slow, makes a lot of noise, and struggles to open your email. But it somehow manages to get the job done although you’ll complain every time you use it and say, “man, I wish my laptop weren’t from the stone-age.” That summarizes the states of roads pretty well.

Madagascar is very mountainous in the center, dry and arid on the west coast, and wet and green on the east and north coast. The landscape makes it impossible to build highways like we have in the United States. Our national highway system is regulated with strict building guides, 8 pages worth of regulations actually, which is incredibly short. These 8 pages determine the grade, width, and all other sorts of things about how our highways are built.

Things like that don’t exist here, leaving the national “highways” to look more like mountain roads. They’re only two lanes, one going either way. There is no middle line. Every part of the road is a passing zone. They weave back and forth up mountains and through valleys. There are no “emergency runways” for trucks. And every road has potholes dotting the center and sides. You can be driving at nearly 50mph before coming to a screeching halt in the middle of the empty road because there is a one-foot-deep pothole resting peacefully in the middle of it. Oh, don’t let me forget that there are dahalo, cattle hustler bandits, who patrol some of the more isolated parts of the road at night. So that’s a thing.

This kind of highway system causes major problems for a country where the majority of the population lives in the hard-to-reach rural areas and another chunk lives in the middle of a mountain range, where I am. Trucks struggle to get supplies to the capital city, and most rural areas just subsist on their own with very little influence from the outside world. Think back to the dirt road I told you about when we, quite literally, drove to the end of the road on our way to Rova d’Antogona.

The roads in Tana are even worse. There are cobblestone roads, ancient in many ways, with giant holes in them. Sometimes it looks as if a small bomb went off and left a crater in the middle of the road. It’s the same for the paved roads. Unlike cities in the United States which have been designed for both cars and pedestrians, cars take primacy over people here. Rules of the road? Huh? What?

There’s an unspoken code that I have slowly been picking up as we drive in taxis. For instance, it’s not impolite to cut someone off (most of the time), those in the rotary wheel still get right-of-way, and the horn can be used to communicate literally anything, even hello, thank you, and f* off. Cars also have the right-of-way over pedestrians, although they do stop sometimes at crosswalks. Oh, and there are no stop lights, not a single one. Although Megan claims she saw one, broken, out of commission, and on the side of the road. But she claims it was there. Still, traffic is either self-directed or directed by police with whistles.

Back to the road problem. The roads are too narrow. Sidewalks are just as bad. It makes everything very crowded, and sometimes what can be as short as a 20min drive can easily turn into an hour or more. The small sidewalks make it difficult to move around sometimes, mostly because they are filled with street vendors. Needless to say, I’ve become very good at walking through busy streets and in-between cars.

I will, however, commend the people here in that there are few accidents. The quality of roads and how crowded it is forces drivers to slow down and to be very attentive and alert. What may seem as dangerous is actually just organized chaos. Nonetheless, transportation, due to poor road infrastructure, is a major problem that continues to hold back a lot of development projects.

This brings me to electricity. There’s just not enough. The powerplants can’t always supply enough for the whole city, and there are frequent power outages for no reason. Recently, someone blew up a transformer. I’m not even joking. The guy targeted a major transformer and just blew it up. The government is now repairing it, claiming it will take 6-8 months, which is about the remainder of my stay. In the meantime, however, the reduction of electrical output means there will be regular power shedding nearly every day.

For those of you who have not experienced this, power shedding is when the government shuts off the power in a neighborhood for a given amount of time so electricity can be used elsewhere. It then rotates to another neighborhood, then another, and so on. What this means for us is that we lose power for 2-3 hours a day at an unscheduled time with nothing we can do about it. That’s just how it is.

I actually lost power while writing this, which I find mildly amusing.

And for water, well, I have a whole blog written about water coming out at some point. I can’t flood you with too many blog posts. Ah, more puns. But I can summarize it as the water situation is just as bad. There isn’t enough capacity or safe water to go around in many places. When it rains, many of the drainage pipes get clogged due to an excess of waste, garbage from the side of the road essentially. Sometimes there are holes in the sidewalk peering down into the dark abyss of Tana’s sewage and drainage system. More on that later.

For now, suffice it to say that infrastructure is an important component to building a strong society, and the lack of infrastructure here certainly curtails any attempts to raise the standard of living. This leads me to the corruption issue again, and somewhat international relationships. I’ll talk about foreign aid in greater detail later, but to put it briefly, there are two strategies in approaching helping developing countries fortify their infrastructure. The United States and international organizations, like the World Bank, send money. The money has strings attached but is often wasted. For example, the beautiful soccer stadium I have told you about was built with World Bank money during the pandemic. Yes, the new, big, awesome soccer stadium that they can’t use took priority over, let’s say, fixing the electricity or water problem. They also just opened a brand new, modern airport terminal at Ivato International Airport, which is very important as it will welcome one flight a day for the foreseeable future… Again, much more important than roadways to decrease supply chain issues.

Then there’s the Chinese approach which entails sending companies to build bridges, roads, factories, etc. There are drawbacks and opportunity costs, but at least those things actually work and are used, sometimes. Nonetheless, those public works projects use Chinese not Malagasy labor. And so the cycle continues. Unfortunately, these problems aren’t unique to Madagascar. Actually, they’re endemic across most of the developing world. Which is why the issue of corruption and infrastructure is so pressing yet difficult to deal with.

We can liken it to the individual person. If our hearts and minds are not directed well; that is, if they are not oriented to the good and guided with the virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and wisdom, then our actions and fruit, or lack thereof, will reflect this inner disposition accordingly. Just as a country needs good infrastructure and order, so, too, does the human person need a solid foundation of life, morals, virtues, and principles to flourish. And this process, just like a developing country, starts at the head and the heart. Man, how is that for tying it all back into something useful for you? As always, know that you are in my prayers each morning. All I ask is that you do the same for me.

May God be praised.