Benin's largest city, Cotonou, has seen a building boom in recent years, and a new coastal road has cut travel times to Ouidah, the country's spiritual and cultural capital. Over the last decade, Benin's annual GDP has grown from 3% to 6%, a regional high, and an industrial zone has been launched north-west of Cotonou to industrialise the nation's largely informal economy.
“Benin is now looking like a paradise,” said Savossou Stanislas, a 40-year-old tyre repairer in the official capital, Porto-Novo. The rapid infrastructural development has been overseen by Patrice Talon, who served as president from 2016 until this May.
The Kagame model
For years, Benin was content in the shadow of Nigeria, a neighbour about eight times its size and with about 16 times its population. Talon's predecessor, Thomas Boni Yayi, once quipped during a visit to Abuja that “Benin is the 37th state of Nigeria”. Talon, who enjoys good relations with Nigeria and called on it to help quell an attempted coup in December, chose a different path: to engineer enough growth for Benin to be recognised in its own right.
Widely believed to be Benin's richest person, Talon, known as “the cotton king”, made his name in agriculture but diversified into banking and hospitality. Before becoming president, he had financed the campaigns of Yayi and Yayi's predecessor, Mathieu Kérékou.
Critics say his development agenda has come at a severe cost: once held up as a poster child for democratic transition in west Africa, Benin has also undergone democratic decline since Talon took power. In many respects, Talon modelled his governance style on Paul Kagame, Rwanda's de facto leader since 1994, who has combined repression with policies aimed at economic and social transformation. The two men became allies, and Talon appointed two former Rwandan officials to head sensitive Beninese government agencies. Benin has also sought Rwanda's help in countering a growing insurgency along the border with Nigeria.
Democratic decline and a new constitution
By the end of Talon's first term, strict new election laws and heavy registration fees had purged much of the opposition from parliament. In 2019, the government shut down the internet during a parliamentary election as people protested against the changes. The judiciary was co-opted to muzzle dissent, resulting in the targeting of several dozen former allies and dissidents, including opposition leader Reckya Madougou, who is in prison on charges of “undermining the state”, and journalist Hugues Comlan Sossoukpé.
In April 2021, a month after Madougou's arrest, Essowé Batamoussi, a judge at the court for the repression of economic offences and terrorism, resigned and fled to France to seek asylum. “There was no justice in her [Madougou's] case,” Batamoussi said. “We received an empty file and a threat: if we did not put her in jail, we were in danger.”
Last November, a controversial constitutional amendment, the second of Talon's tenure, elongated the presidential term from five years to seven and introduced thresholds that kept opposition parties outside parliament. It also created a new senate, whose members are all appointed by government rather than elected. Within a month of parliament approving the amendment, mutineers led by a former commander of the national guard attempted a coup, citing Talon's authoritarianism and inability to tackle rising insecurity.
Only one opposition candidate was approved to stand in April's presidential election, which was won by Talon's hand-picked successor, Romuald Wadagni, with more than 94% of the vote. In August, Talon himself returned to centre stage as president of the senate.
What price progress?
Morgan Assogba, a Cotonou-based geopolitical analyst, described Talon as a “gigantic political actor with a good understanding of how politics works in Benin”, who had reshaped the political arena to suit his economic development drive. For Guillaume Moumouni, a professor of political science and international relations at the University of Abomey-Calavi, Talon's dual policies of constitutional change and development constituted a “carrot and stick” approach to governing, aimed at ensuring the political environment did not jeopardise his economic objectives. In time, however, he added, there was “less carrot and more stick” as freedoms were increasingly suppressed.
During his campaign for the April election, Wadagni vowed to tackle extreme poverty, a tacit admission that economic growth had not benefited all Beninese. The minimum monthly wage increased from 40,000 CFA francs to 52,000 CFA francs (£52-£68) in January 2023, but many still earn far less. In recent years, rent and electricity tariffs have also risen by at least 15%, while the price of fuel has almost doubled. “With the upcoming school term, we don't know how we'll manage,” said Stanislas, the tyre repairer, who has four children of school age.
Most of the development has been in Cotonou and Ouidah, Talon's home town. Opposition figures have said there has been a lack of transparency in some projects, while civil society groups said some were awarded to entities linked to Talon's political allies and business network. According to a 2023 report by Amnesty International, four development projects resulted in mass forced evictions that affected at least 6,000 people. The communication ministry was approached for comment.
Moumouni said economically Talon's vision had brought net progress. “People are not gaining or enjoying much more in terms of cash, but they are enjoying [progress] in terms of social infrastructure,” he said. “There's room for improvement for sure but compared to 10 or 15 years ago, there is quite a huge difference.” Eugène Azatassou, the vice-president of the opposition Democrats party, feels differently: “Development cannot be limited to roads and buildings. It must also be measured by the quality of democracy, purchasing power, employment, security, improvement of living conditions … when a power continuously modifies political and electoral rules in order to conserve control of institutions, we have the right to ask ourselves if we are facing [only] a facade of development.”
