What the height of toilet bowls say about the quality of life in Togo and Senegal
Peter Kimani
By
Peter Kimani
| Oct 03, 2025
We’re urged to always count our blessings, and I am doing precisely that this morning. If you thought my eight-hour ordeal was such a disaster, some friends travelling from Johannesburg had a much gruelling experience.
From Johannesburg, they landed in Dubai, from where they were assured they would be transported to Dakar. It wasn’t to be. Instead, they were asked to head to Istanbul, from where they would be delivered to Dakar.
But the folks in Instabul, Turkey, said they had no plans to travel to Dakar, so they were grounded in Instabul for two more days before being delivered to Dakar, some 48 hours later than their original schedule, arriving just in time for the official closing ceremony of the conference they were supposed to preside over.
That’s the absurdity of colonial legacies that make inter-Africa travel a virtual impossibility. For some ancient, if deliberate historical reasons, it’s always been cheaper and smoother to travel to North America and Europe than it is to travel from Ethiopia to Eritrea, Rwanda to Burundi, Kenya to Senegal.
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Then of course we have our local attitudes towards service that militates against common sense. The outward sign of the dysfunction of the Gnassingbe Eyadema International Airport was in a leaking urinal—with a patchwork of wastewater pipe that drained to a blue dustpan on the floor.
I know resources are in short supply and it be could that this national resource needed viraka from their fundi, rather than their artisans having broken disjointed thoughts about plumbing.
A curious distinction is that toilet bowls in the Lome airport are pretty low, almost at small boys’ level, while those in Dakar are pretty high, so that even tall men have to tiptoe. I have no preference, either way, because I don’t mind exercising to perform the most mundane of tasks.
By the way, what’s the reason behind malfunctioning soap dispensers? Why invest in them if they seldom work, and when washing soap is packaged in contraptions that drip droplets at a simple press? Some things just don’t make sense.