Senegal to Nigeria superhighway still stuck in a rut

It has been so many decades in the planning that the original proposals are written by typewriter, and two of the countries involved had different names. But when the trans-west African highway network was envisaged in 1967, it was seen as an essential way of stimulating growth and promoting tourism in west African countries. More than 40 years later, the project – intended to link the Senegalese capital Dakar on Africa's western coast with Nigeria's commercial hub Lagos in central-west Africa – has still not been completed. But governments in west Africa and international organisations insist that the vision still exists. I'm driving along part of the route in Ghana. The country's first six-lane road, the George Walker Bush motorway (pdf) opened last year and was named after the former American president as a gesture of friendship between the two countries. Street lights along the route – still rare on Ghana's main roads – are decorated with American and Ghanaian flags. The "George W Bush", as it's popularly known in Ghana, begins at the labyrinthine Tetteh Quarshie interchange just north of the capital Accra, beside its first modern shopping complex, the Accra mall. It carries an estimated 36,000 vehicles per day, and – despite frequent traffic lights and pedestrian crossings – has reduced peak travel time between Tetteh Quarshie and Accra's western suburbs from one hour to 20 minutes.

But the motorway is only 14km (eight miles) long. The trunk road continues for around another 20km, then I spend more than an hour sitting in stationary traffic, first at a toll booth, then at a police roadblock in the suburban town of Kasua. The road then shrinks to a two-lane road of varying quality west through Cape Coast and oil hub Takoradi, before becoming increasingly potholed as it continues on to the border with Ivory Coast. Independent west Africa's founding fathers envisaged a high-speed road more than 4,000km long that would facilitate links between Ghana, Ivory Coast and other countries, with a reliable road and harmonised customs procedures. continued