Benefits of economic miracle remain stuck in Ivory Coast’s biggest city
Abidjan — Standing knee-deep in muddy water to sift gravel in oppressive heat, a handful of middle-aged miners search for diamonds, clinging to what seems like a dying trade in a region with few job opportunities. "It’s unpredictable," Pierre Silue, a miner wearing ragged clothes, said as he took a break to stretch his back. "Sometimes you go a week without earning anything." Tens of thousands of diamond miners used to work around Tortiya, an isolated town at the end of a 48km unpaved road through grasslands in northern Ivory Coast. At its height, the mining company that developed Tortiya — named after John Steinbeck’s novel Tortilla Flat — produced 175,000 carats a year. Now it is a symbol of the widening gap between the interior and the booming coastal south in an economy that has expanded at an average annual rate of 9% over the past five years, the fastest in Africa. While a surge in construction is transforming the biggest city, Abidjan, and attracting investors from Mauritius ...
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