Sidi Mohamed Chmad – Sahara Media envoy to Kiffa (Assaba)
The city of Kiffa sums up the story of Mauritania. It is the city from which major politicians, intellectuals, merchants, and businessmen emerged. It is still steadfast in the face of the difficult climate and the harsh nature, to become the commercial capital of Mauritania, and the land of inspiring stories and endless tales.
When Mokhtar Ould Daddah visited it, years after independence, he decided to exploit the energies of its enthusiastic youth. He asked every young man who practices a craft or aspires to it, to return with him to Nouakchott, to help implement the project of the nascent capital.
At that time, “Mohamed Al-Saghir” was a young man of twenty years old, working as an apprentice carpenter in Kiffa. He decided to respond to the call of the founding president, so a private plane carried him, along with dozens of young men, towards a vast desert called “Nouakchott.”
“Mohammed Al-Saghir” received quick training at the hands of a French company, and graduated as part of a group of carpenters and builders, who built the presidential palace and other government institutions with their own hands, and after that they built the Central Bank building.
Today, “Mohammed Al-Saghir” sits in the city of Kiffa, to tell Sahara Media his story, when he decided, after years of living in Nouakchott, to return to Kiffa. The city he had lived in since his childhood. He left a modern capital and an attractive salary and resided in Kiffa as a carpenter for the state inspectorate with a small salary.
Leaning on a cane with a hunched back, “Mohamed Al-Saghir” recalls the years that formed the identity of a city and a person linked by an existential relationship. When we asked him about “how he is,” he replied to us: “It is the side of Mauritania.”
Founding story
The founding of the city of Kiffa goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century, when French colonialism decided to establish a city in an area that was then called “Ahsi Babo.” However, the nascent city soon received large migrations from villages and valleys from the central and eastern regions, due to drought, and was then transformed into To a pivotal commercial center.
“Muhammad Al-Saghir” says that it originally relied on grazing and animal development, and on agriculture to a lesser level, but with independence, its commercial market began to witness great activity, becoming over time an important source of supply for several states.
City market
In the old quarter of the city, trucks are crowded with carts and bicycles, while workers are sweating in one of the hottest cities in the country in the summer, as it sometimes exceeds 50 degrees Celsius. Despite this, the movement does not stop in the (Kiffa) market, which today is the third largest commercial center after… Nouakchott and Nouadhibou.
The young man, “Saadan,” talks about the beginning of his joining the market in 2016, as a simple worker in a commercial store, but thanks to his commercial activity, he achieved significant capital and started his own project, becoming one of the most important distributors of food and fodder.
The young trader adds that the market, despite its great importance, suffers from power outages that are “almost permanent, which exposes the materials to the risk of damage.”
As for “Musa,” who is also a merchant, he believes that the market is no longer that important, after what he says is “the recovery of the markets of neighboring cities,” and therefore the young merchant believes that “it is necessary to bring about fundamental reforms in the market system by the merchants and the municipality.”
Meanwhile, some merchants complain of “lack of cleanliness, high municipal taxes, lack of planning, and lack of control over the general market system.”
President’s visit
Today, the city of Kiffa received Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Sheikh Al-Ghazouani, who knows it and knows it. Hundreds of citizens welcomed him, bringing back memories of the visit of the country’s first president, and recalling the shortcomings it suffers from.
Market traders talked about the lack of hygiene as they watched Ould Ghazouani’s inauguration of a new waste dump, the first of its kind in the city, which is described as the country’s commercial capital.
The state spent one billion old ounces of its budget on the new landfill, to include units for treating solid waste, in order to recycle and dispose of it as required by environmental systems, especially since the city’s market produces large quantities of waste daily.
Waste is not the only thing that is troubling the city, but for decades it has been facing the dilemma of thirst, so Ould Ghazouani decided during his visit to launch a project to supply several neighborhoods of the city with drinking water, starting from the Bocadom station, 40 km away.
The authorities announced that the project will supply Kiffa with more than 2,000 cubic meters of water daily, awaiting the larger project, which depends on the water of the Senegal River, which has been working on for years.
During his visit to Kiffa, Ould Ghazouani inspected the construction of 368 social housing units for the benefit of the most vulnerable groups in the city, within the framework of the “Dari” program, which is part of Ould Ghazouani’s pledges since he came to power five years ago.
The authorities had announced that work had been completed on only 50 houses of the project, under the supervision of the General Delegation for National Solidarity and Combating Exclusion “Synergy.”
