Wilfred Fiifi Ansah

Bangkok is easy to like for many things, not least aromatic chow. 😊 But I like Bangkok also because I think Thailand is a great vantage point from which to look at Africa's historical policy challenges. It isn't all that richer than Africa's largest economies (Thailand - $577bn; South Africa - $489bn; Egypt - $443bn; Nigeria - $387bn; & Algeria - $332bn). Population-wise it is like Tanzania or South Africa. GDP per capita: Thailand - ~$8000; Seychelles - ~$21,000; Mauritius - ~$12,500; South Africa - $7700; Algeria - ~$6900). Adjusted for PPP, Gabon, Egypt, Botswana, & Libya are all as rich as Thailand. Since 1960, there have been about 11 coups + attempts in Thailand, right up there with the most "interrupted" governance systems in Africa. All this to say that it is more sensible to draw on recent Thai experiences than those of Singapore, South Korea, & UAE, as some are wont to do. In fact, for what I want to discuss - mass rail transit such as skytrain, monorail, subway, etc - Thailand is even more apt because Bangkok started building these things in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the country's GDP per capita was comparable to countries like Morocco, Ghana, Cote D'Ivoire, Kenya, and Guinea today. Imagine then my delight in discovering on my latest trip that the experience of Bangkok's skytrain (BTS) and subway (MRT) is superior to most similar services in London, New York, and Paris! From the thoughtful mind-your-calorie nudges to use the stairs to the cultured queuing on platforms during rush-hour to the hard stats of performance such as punctuality and ancillary uptime (such as turnstiles working as expected), Bangkok's skytrain and subway are quite impressive. I am not just being anecdotal. 99.95% of passenger journeys on the network avoided delays of five minutes or more in 2024/2025, and it took 204,350 ticket transactions to record a single fault. The country has steadily nurtured domestic contractors such as CH Karnchang, Italian-Thai and Sino-Thai to build and maintain much of the network. It has been far from easy as the attachments show. The key insight is "policy stamina" and "national learning" as we say in the Katanomics lexicon. Bangkok's first serious elevated metro, the Lavalin Skytrain, began in 1984 and was abandoned in 1992. The Hopewell concession was signed in 1990. It flopped badly. It wasn't until 2004 that the State really learnt how to master the game. Learning has been continuous. Signal failures halted the BTS 11 times in June 2018. Since then, very rarely. Whilst Cairo is now showing the way, most other African examples have been cautionary tales. In Rivers State, Nigeria, a 2009 attempt remains a shell and no one can figure out how much precisely has been sunk into the project. Ghana's most recent attempt terminated in criminal prosecutions after a fiasco involving ghostly Brazilian licenses and shady brokers. See the thread for a snapshot chart of the convoluted saga. But the real issue isn't the failures. It is the learning and refinement.