Singer Akon's ambitious plan to build a $6 billion futuristic city in Senegal, known as Akon City, has reportedly been abandoned in favour of a more practical development, according to BBC. Announced in 2018 as a tech-driven, eco-friendly utopia for the global Black community with its own cryptocurrency, Akoin, the city featured Wakanda-like skyscrapers and bold promises. Despite land being purchased and funding claimed in 2020, progress stalled, and focus has now shifted to a more achievable alternative.
According to BBC, initial designs for Akon City, with its boldly curvaceous skyscrapers, were compared by commentators to the awe-inspiring fictional city of Wakanda in Marvel's Black Panther films and comic books.
But after five years of setbacks, the 800-hectare site in Mbodiene - about 100km (60 miles) south of the capital, Dakar - remains mostly empty. The only structure is an incomplete reception building. There are no roads, no housing, no power grid.
"We were promised jobs and development," one local resident told the BBC. "Instead, nothing has changed."
Meanwhile the star's Akoin cryptocurrency has struggled to repay its investors over the years, with Akon himself conceding: "It wasn't being managed properly - I take full responsibility for that."
The city is surrounded by barren land with no roads, housing or a power grid.
Plans for phase one - that were due to be completed by the end of 2023 - included a hospital, shopping mall, school, police station, a waste centre and a solar plant.
Sitting on Senegal's Atlantic Coast, Akon's high-tech, eco-friendly city was supposed to run entirely on renewable energy.
But despite Akon's insistence in a 2022 BBC interview that the project was "100,000% moving", no significant construction followed the initial launch ceremony.
