Tribune by Madi Sakandé “Let’s Dare to Revolutionize Refrigeration”

In Africa, refrigeration is still seen as a luxury. That is a deadly mistake. Refrigeration is the backbone of our food, health, and digital sovereignty. But not only that. It is time to make it a matter of state, not a comfort option. Madi Sakandé, President of U-3ARC

Mile 12, Lagos – Nigeria

I remember Mile 12 the way one remembers a slap. That sprawling market, one of the largest in West Africa, where whole truckloads of tomatoes arrive every night after hours on battered roads. Men and women who have toiled for months on vast plots under a sun that forgives nothing. And there, under the sheds, in the heat that clings to the skin, I watched mountains of tomatoes collapse onto themselves, turn red, then black, while traders shouted prices that crumbled hour by hour. No cold room. No refrigerated break in the chain. Just time working against the farmer, minute after minute.

This scene, Nigerian filmmaker Ike Nnaebue filmed with a precision that overwhelmed me. Our documentary, “Damaged Goods,” shot over months in several African countries, tells what I have lived and denounced for a long time: producers who exhaust themselves on vast plots without ever escaping precarity, because more than 60% of their tomato harvest rots before finding a buyer. The tomato becomes an implacable symbol: a fruit steeped in labor, condemned by the absence of refrigeration even before it reaches the table.

I have seen this scene, or its twins, in about ten African countries. I felt it in my nostrils before I understood it with my head. So let me ask the question that has haunted me for twenty-five years: how much longer will Africa be the only continent that produces in sweat and throws away in indifference?

Without refrigeration, there is no dignity.

REFRIGERATION, A RAMPART OF SOVEREIGNTY

As a young technician, I was taught to repair compressors. No one ever told me that I was in fact repairing entire pieces of our sovereignty. I say it with twenty-five years of fieldwork: refrigeration is not an accessory to development, it is its backbone. Three pillars prove it.

Food first. At Mile 12 as in the rest of our countries, the scenario repeats itself: in sub-Saharan Africa, post-harvest losses linked to an inadequate or nonexistent cold chain are estimated at 70% or more, the equivalent of several hundred million tons of food lost each year. Meanwhile, we import entire shipments of frozen fish from Norway, while our own fishermen and market gardeners watch their work rot on the spot. Refrigeration is the nutritional security of the next twenty-five years. Nothing less.

Digital, finally, because our future is also being played out there. Our emerging data centers burn an insane amount of energy cooling themselves with technologies designed for other climates. You do not build digital sovereignty on imported and unsuitable air conditioning. We need refrigeration engineering designed here, for here.

THE INSULT OF TECHNOLOGICAL DUMPING

There is one thing I will no longer tolerate in my career: that under the guise of generosity, we are delivered equipment designed to operate at 15°C and then asked to make it hold up at 45°C in the shade. That is not aid. That is a dump disguised as cooperation. And meanwhile, our own states tax the import of new and high-performance refrigeration equipment between 40% and 111%. How do you expect to feed more than a billion Africans if you make refrigeration unaffordable for those who need it most?

We will not be respected as long as our governments accept donations of refrigerators that cannot hold up, while our engineers are unemployed.

I have trained brilliant young technicians, capable of designing solutions adapted to our climatic realities, and I have watched them look on, powerless, as containers of obsolete equipment arrived—equipment that even its countries of origin no longer wanted. That is not a gift. That is an admission of contempt.

U-3ARC’S ROADMAP

Enough of observations. Here is what we carry at U-3ARC, and what we demand.

Train, massively. A young person trained in green refrigeration is a lasting job, a circular economy, a skill that remains on the continent instead of fleeing with the brains. We have the workshops, we have the will; we need investment and recognition of this trade as a trade of the future.

Regulate, at last. We call for an African Refrigeration Directive: common standards, a requirement for energy efficiency, a priority given to natural refrigerants. Without a framework, each country reinvents the wheel, or worse, imports it broken.

Build balanced partnerships. We do not refuse foreign technology. We refuse charity that humiliates. Every partnership must now include a real transfer of skills and co-construction on African soil, with African engineers at the decision-making table, not only in the photos.

SOVEREIGNTY OR THE WAITING LINE

I am not writing this tribune so that I will be pitied. I am writing it because I have spent twenty-five years greasing compressors, training hands, watching mountains of tomatoes blacken at Mile 12, tons of fish rot on our coasts, and vaccines agonize in unworthy refrigerators. I know the price of the refrigeration we do not have. I also know the pride of those in the field who know how to master it as soon as they are given the means.

To heads of state, ministers, and decision-makers who will read these lines: make refrigeration a national strategic axis, or accept remaining forever in the waiting line of development.

We have chosen sovereignty.