Protests over lack of water and electricity turned violent late last week in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, and the government responded with tear gas, rubber bullets, and a curfew.
I know about the crisis because of friends with family there. I have not seen the story on American TV, which I mention with anxiety over endangered media heterogeneity. You can read more about the protests at, e.g., Reuters (UK), TRT Afrika (Turkey), RFI (France), WION (India), Al Jazeera (Qatar), and if you dig for it, the AP (US).
I was in Antananarivo, known locally as "Tana," in July. The people there could not have been more gracious and welcoming.
At the same time, socioeconomic tension was plain. That's not unusual in African cities, but in Tana, by plain, I mean that there were troubling and unavoidably visible signs of increasingly worrisome economic inequality.
A Tale of Two CitiesI used the nicely equipped gym on the eighth floor of the Radisson Blu Hotel in Tana. The room has floor-to-ceiling windows that afford a view of the city from the treadmills. But if one looks straight down from the windows, immediately adjacent to the hotel, there is a residential warren of ramshackle homes. Children play on clay paths between crumbling walls and an open sewer. The neighborhood is right behind a concentration of auto shops, noxious with exhaust and dribbling out the toxic effluents of their work.
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Shanty town and auto district adjacent to Radisson. A cable-car line is visible on the horizon.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) |
In contrast, the Radisson itself is part of a small swanky village that boasts a grocery store, theater, cafes, and gift shops. The village is enclosed by high walls with only one road in from the auto-shop strip. At night, a massive steel door rolls shut to seal off the Radisson village.
The scene is reminiscent of the fictional town of Woodbury in The Walking Dead, fortified against an incongruent dystopia. Though to reiterate, here, in real life, the souls outside the wall are good people trying to make ends meet. As the sun sets, all but a few local people evacuate the commercial village before the door closes, and then they flow back in with the light of dawn.
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Kids play beside a drainage canal behind the Radisson.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) |
Even the walled Radisson village, anyway, is not immune from Tana's socioeconomic troubles, because the utility infrastructure is the same, inside and out. The tap water is not recommended for drinking, and power outages are frequent, if usually short.
Malagasy people generally don't have freezers and shop daily for produce. The cost of appliances would be manageable for many. But the problem would remain the power grid, which is not sufficiently reliable, even in the city, to make home refrigeration cost effective. When the power goes out, most of Tana life hums on without interruption. But the outages paralyze places such as the Radisson village, where devices from refrigerators to televisions to elevators are essential to business.
In bizarre juxtaposition with the motley cityscape, wires are strung across Tana's skies, visible from anywhere. The wires reach from tower to tower and occasionally dip groundward into modern multistory buildings of metal and brick. This is Tana's brand new cable-car system.
I was not surprised to read that protestors last week set fire to "several" of the cable-car stations.
Madagascar and the Monorail
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A cable-car line fills the sky behind the Tana train station.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) | |
The motivation for building the cable-car system was ostensibly sound. Tana is plagued by jammed traffic, which is impeding economic development. One of the reasons people crowd into the tight and unsanitary living quarters of the inner city is that they could not otherwise reach their jobs if they moved to better accommodation on the outskirts.
The cable-car lines promise to soar over the cars and trucks, moving people into and out of the city with quiet efficiency. The lines also are built to reach less developed surrounding areas, rather than tracking the congested main highway, thus inducing new suburbs to bloom and alleviating the crisis of housing, besides transportation.
One doesn't have to look hard at the plan, though, to doubt its cost-benefit analysis. To start with, the road congestion is a function of infrastructure failure as much as volume. Though there are some recently constructed traffic circles, most roads are unmarked by lanes, and most city intersections are chaotic tangles with no right of way indicated by signs or signal lights.
One wonders that infrastructure money might have been spent better to bring the existing potholed road system up to standard before stringing cables over head between shiny stations.
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Cable cars hang motionless over Tana in July.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) |
Then there are the cable cars themselves. The first time
a friend and I had a look at them, I couldn't help but say aloud, "That wreaks of kickback." My friend agreed. We both thought immediately of "
Marge vs. The Monorail."
The 198 gondola cars can hold only 12 passengers each and move only so fast. The system is designed to move daily 75,000 people and replace 2,000 cars on the road. That's not nothing, but also not a big chunk of potential commuters relative to the city's population of 3 million. And if one figures that growing suburbs will attract more people to Tana from impoverished parts of the country, the problem of induced demand is compounded.
Though cable cars are touted as a potential boon for urban development, they work best as a discrete-route solution for particular hurdles, such as topography, and as a complement, not a substitute, for proven mass transit systems such as busses and rail cars, both lacking in Tana. A "bus system" exists only insofar as terribly overcrowded minibuses barrel along customary routes. Limited inter-city locomotives rumble over dilapidated tracks.
Is There a Hyena in the Debt Trap?
It's unclear from government reporting just how much the cable-car system cost Madagascar, but it's a lot. The price tag was supposed to be €152 million. The French government loaned the country €28 from the French treasury and arranged for the rest by private loan from Société Générale. Malagasy voters were not happy about the indebtedness. Moreover, Madagascar committed to fund any cost overruns. Some reports say that the French loans wound up covering only one of the two system lines.
The government's revenue basis to fund cost overruns and pay back the loans also is shaky. Malagasy people have balked at the cost of tickets on the cable-car system, which range from about €0.65 to €1.1. That might be low by western standards, but it's a lot locally. Daily round trips add up to at least €32 per month in a country where the monthly living wage is only €126, and €85 marks the low end of actual-wage estimates.
The government has not been forthcoming with data about the project, and no wonder. Malagasy-French businessman Andry Rajoelina has been president since 2019 and held out a technological solution to Tana's legendary traffic woes as a showpiece project. Rajoelina's vision has been slow to come to fruition. Plans were sidetracked initially by the pandemic. The French money came only in 2021, and construction began in 2022, with delivery promised in two years. In 2024, the Rajoelina administration inaugurated the cable-car system amid much fanfare and worldwide press. But the system wasn't actually finished then, and operational opening was postponed to 2025.
On my last day in Tana in July 2025, the cable cars moved, surprising everyone on the ground. The system was not yet open, but was being tested. Buckets of water were loaded into cars to simulate the weight of passengers. The system finally opened in August.
The worst public relations challenge the cable-car system has posed to the Rajoelina administration to date is not its ultimate efficacy, but simply the foreboding physical presence of the empty gondolas hanging motionless over the city. When people are stuck in traffic, or when the power goes out, or when they leave their homes in search of drinkable water, they look up at the network of towers and heavy wires and wonder whether any of that debt and spending will make their lives better.
Don't Look Up
I'm sometimes guilty myself of a siloed focus on American affairs. And thinking about what's happening in Madagascar makes me wonder whether—when?—the day will come that Americans turn our frustrations into conflagration.
America feels every day less a "developed" country in terms of critical needs such as transportation, healthcare, housing, and jobs. And people struggle more every day to make ends meet, while politicians bellyache over the government supposedly doing too much.
An anecdotal survey:
Transportation. To travel for work, I have to make the arduous, two-plus-hour trek to the airport via foot, bus, train, and bus again, across slow, unconnected, and overpriced transit systems that my region is lucky to have at all. When I land in Europe, I'll travel about the same distance with one ticket on a rapid, unified transit system in under an hour.
Amtrak is hard at work on "NextGen Acela." But it will only serve the northeast corridor and will top out at 160 mph. Europe hit that mark in the 1970s with trains today running in the 190s. China and Japan have high-speed trains on dedicated lines running at 220 mph. Anyway, "old gen" Acela was a corporate subsidy, as it practically priced out non-business travelers, even before Amtrak introduced predatory dynamic pricing.
Healthcare. My wife and I saw Trevor Noah deliver his latest stand-up in Connecticut a couple of weeks ago, and he did a long bit on the nonsensical costs and bureaucracies that tyrannize patients in the U.S. healthcare system. Noah was treated for a wrist injury he sustained just before boarding a plane home to New York from his native South Africa. He could have been treated faster and for less out of pocket had he just flown back to a hospital in Cape Town, he only half-joked.
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A Connecticut stage awaits Trevor Noah on September 18.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) |
Most memorable about Noah's monolog to me, besides his trademark storytelling brilliance, was the chorus of audible vocalizations of assent and empathy from the audience, including us, as Noah described the absurdities of hospital billing, from the mysteries of bloated pricing—weren't we promised "
No Surprises"?—and picayune itemization of the mundane to the unashamed prioritization of profit over care.
Housing and jobs. My daughter bought a home in Los Angeles this year and has done yeoman, Instagram-hit renovation work herself. But she's looking for a new job to make the mortgage bearable. From her scores of applications, she recently rated an interview in her entertainment-industry wheelhouse. Yet she was one of 54 people interviewed for one low-level position. A form email later communicated regret that she was among the hundreds of unsuccessful applicants. Every American job-seeker knows such woes amid the full-time job of looking for a job, despite the touting of low unemployment by the administrations of both parties.
A measure of wealth inequality, the U.S. gini coefficient was 41.8 in 2025, on a scale from 0, perfect equality, to perfect inequality 100, according to World Population Review (WPR). That's bad for a well developed economy, comparing unfavorably with, for example, western European countries, which score in the low 30s, and Canada, at 29.9. Worse, inequality in the United States is rising over the long term, while it's falling elsewhere.
Our number is, however, on par with Madagascar. Malagasy data are difficult to come by, but WPR estimates a 2025 gini coefficient of 42.5, also on the rise over the long term.
The gini coefficient is a ratio, so it doesn't speak to comparable sums. People in a poorly developed economy might be quicker to disrupt the status quo when their very survival is on the line than people in a highly developed economy who become unable to afford cable TV.
At the same time, Americans have a temperamental sensitivity to injustice and, even after 250 years, little patience for tyranny.
History is littered with great societies befelled by their own greedy elites.
