Plans for Akon’s £5 billion city in Senegal scrapped after seven years
Plans for Akon’s utopia, which was set to be run entirely on his cryptocurrency Akoin, have been halted.
More than seven years after Akon first laid down plans to open his own city in Senegal with him confirming in 2022 that things were “100,000% moving forward”, the ambitious project has now been abandoned.
Serigne Mamadou Mboup, head of Senegal’s tourism development body Sapco, told the BBC last week that "the Akon City project no longer exists”, and that an agreement had been reached to start preparations for a more "realistic" project.
The city was set to be run on Akoin, a cryptocurrency set up by Akon, and was projected to cost some $6 billion (£5 billion) to bring to life.
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Officials cited a “lack of funding and halted construction efforts” as the main reason for scrapping the project, the BBC reports.
In September 2020, a plaque on the plot of land that was due to become Akon City was revealed by the hitmaker, with locals hopeful for the project's future. One resident told the BBC back in 2022: "We hope that our children will stay here to work".
In the same interview, Akon explained: “I don't like to use the word 'the king of the city'. But that's what it will turn out to be.”
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Akon City had previously been described by media as a "futuristic" city with similarities to Wakanda, a fictional metropolis as seen in Marvel's Black Panther comic books and films, and was set to feature curved skyscrapers, garages for flying cars, and a solar plant to make the city sustainable.
The timeline of the city’s development seemed fleshed out. Akon told Nick Cannon in 2019 that 'phase two' of the Akon City project was set to commence in 2025.
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Phase one of the project was due to be finished by the end of 2023, and was set to involve the construction of buildings important to the infrastructure of a city, such as a hospital, a school, a waste centre, and a police station. By the end of 2023, none of this had come to fruition.
For now, it's unclear what the plans for Akon’s "realistic" city will involve.
[Via: BBC]
Finn Cliff Hodges is a freelance journalist, follow him on Instagram.
