Wakanda Never: Akon’s Futuristic City Dream Project, Worth $6 Billion, Ditched By Senegal

Last Updated:July 05, 2025, 19:52 IST

Akon who was born in the US but partly raised in Senegal, announced in 2018 to develop a tech-driven, eco-friendly utopia for the global Black community. 

Phase one alone was to include a hospital, a shopping mall, a school, a police station, a waste centre, and a solar plant. (BBC)

Global singer Akon’s dream plan to establish a $6 billion worth futuristic city in Senegal, known as Akon City, has reportedly been scrapped by the Senegal authorities for a more practical and realistic development.

“The Akon City project no longer exists," Serigne Mamadou Mboup, the head of Senegal’s tourism development body, Sapco, told the BBC.

Known for his string of noughties chart hits, Akon who was born in the US but partly raised in Senegal, announced two ambitious projects in 2018 to develop a tech-driven, eco-friendly utopia for the global Black community.

The first was Akon City – reportedly costed at $6 billion. It was to run on the second initiative – a brand new cryptocurrency called Akoin.

Designed with curvy skyscrapers and sleek modern infrastructure, early renderings of the futuristic Akon City drew comparisons to Marvel’s Black Panther films and comic books metropolis Wakanda.

However, as inspiring as Wakanda was on screen, building it in the real world proved far more difficult. Nearly seven years on, much of the 800-acre piece of land in Mbodiene– about 100km (60 miles) south of the capital, Dakar– allocated for the project 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 news outlet. “Instead, nothing has changed."

Meanwhile, the star’s Akoin cryptocurrency, too, has faltered, with Akon admitting poor management and legal hurdles related to cryptocurrency regulation in Senegal. “It wasn’t being managed properly – I take full responsibility for that," he had said.

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.

Now Senegal is repossessing the land to build something ‘realistic’, BBC reported citing the country’s tourism authorities. Senegal’s leaders had hoped that the project would help transform the country where Akon, born Alioune Badara Thiam, spent a part of his childhood.

Senegal

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