Abstract

On the second anniversary of the meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Japan, some of the focus fell on the abandoned, radioactive ghost towns in and around the disaster exclusion zone from which remaining residents have been forced to evacuate. A series of poignant images shows the empty streets, collapsed houses, unused drinks and rice vending machines, school bags hanging outside a class in an abandoned school (The Guardian, 11 March 2013).1 All are a reminder of the sudden, brutal collapse and absolute fragility of urban livelihoods and materials in the wake of an energy infrastructure failing to with-stand an earthquake and tsunami. Meanwhile, following the explosion in global oil prices in 2008, residents in Lomé in Togo and many other cities in Ghana, Benin and Burkina Faso have become ever more dependent for fuel on an illegal traf-ficking of subsidised petrol from Nigeria. Every morning at dawn, dozens of contain-ers of petrol are washed up on the beaches of Togo and Benin, thrown overboard from boats on their way back from Nigeria. The containers are dragged out of the water and their contents transferred into plastic bot-tles and other receptacles, which are then transported to the streets of Lome ́ and other cities for sale to the local populations at prices up to 30 per cent lower than the normal market price. While this flow of petrol—from resource extraction in Nigerian oil fields, through an intricate transport network, to its burning and use for cooking in somebody’s home—sustains whole livelihoods, cities and informal economies, it also financially benefits mostly local elites who employ the traffickers and represents a significant loss of income for these already-poor West African states (Le