Chad: Oil Wealth Brings Only Superficial Change

19 April 2012
analysis

It's two years since I was last in Chad after a long stint as the BBC correspondent. Not long enough to forget a place you might think, but when I arrived recently in N'Djamena the sweltering dead of night, I got lost.

First on leaving the airport, I found a succession of new wide boulevards lined with park benches, the tarmac replete with fresh white markings, I could not work out how to get to my hotel; then on to the centre of town where the huge gendarmerie base opposite President Deby's 'Palais Rose' has vanished, to be replaced by the 'Place de Republic' - an enormous open space containing a triumphal arch, statues of freed slaves and a collection of animals (antelope, horse and a squirrel), giant TV screens which were playing to no-one in the dark, and of course the ubiquitous Chadian tricolour. Where had the old city gone?

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