With glaring wealth gap, can country afford its glittering new mega-mall?
By Paul Schemm
Associated Press
The Morocco Mall in Casablanca is dripping with glamour and luxury, yet the futuristic silver structure on the coast overlooking the Atlantic is a stark symbol of contrasts in a country where 8.5 million people live in poverty. (Associated Press)
CASABLANCA, Morocco — Inaugurated by pop star Jennifer Lopez in front of the cream of Moroccan society, Casablanca’s first mega-mall, complete with a two-story-high aquarium, is dripping with glamour and luxury.
Developers describe it as a step bringing Morocco closer to the ranks of the developed world, but detractors worry that it is a vanity project that a country teetering on the edge of an economic crisis can ill afford.
Morocco at first seems a curious choice for what its developers are billing as the biggest mall in Africa. It already has world-renowned traditional bazaars featuring exquisite ceramics and rugs that draw tourists from around the globe.
The North African kingdom of 32 million is home to the largest income inequalities in the Arab world.
It now hosts Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Dior and Ralph Lauren boutiques and department store Galeries Lafayette in the new mall, a futuristic, bulbous silver structure perched on Morocco’s coast overlooking the crashing waves of the Atlantic.
The mall – which will host acts such as Shakira and Kanye West for a summer concert series – is a stark symbol of the contrasts of a country with 8.5 million people in poverty that ranks 130 out of 186 on the U.N. human development index.
The 20-minute coastal drive from downtown Casablanca, Morocco’s largest city, to the mall showcases the complexity of the country, with slums hidden from sight by high walls, construction areas for new shopping centers and the villas and nightclubs of the wealthy.
“It is a great honor for Morocco to have a project of such dimensions,” Salwa Akhannouch, head of the Aksal group and the driving force behind the mall, said at its opening this month.
Crowds packed the mall in the weeks after it opened. Shoppers ambled through sunlit galleries and gazed at the aquarium and the 350 stores. Colorfully dressed performers, some from as far away as Eastern Europe, periodically would burst into enthusiastic dance routines to the accompaniment of loud drums.
Few shopping bags were in sight, however, and most visitors seemed just curious to see this much-anticipated monument to shopping that has been four years and $260 million in the making.
“There is a big gulf between the rich and the poor, and the rich just seem to be getting richer and the poor, poorer. The mall is a symbol of that,” said Hassan Ali, a 45-year-old shopkeeper selling hand-tooled leather jackets in Casablanca’s modest old quarter.
Tourism is a vital part of the mall’s plan, said its secretary general, Jenane Laghrar, who anticipates 20 percent of its estimated 12 million annual shoppers will come from abroad. She said sales for the first week were on target.
“When you enter the mall, you see Gucci and Dior, but don’t forget you have the largest content in Africa. At the same time, you have more affordable brands,” she said.
There is also an aspiring middle class that wants to be able to buy these luxury products, she added.
The hope is also that European tourists will add the mall to their usual itineraries of beaches and the exotic cities of Fez and Marrakech.
Ms. Laghrar said the mall is especially hoping to attract visitors from the rest of Africa who pass through Casablanca airport on their way to Europe.
For now, however, visitors from Africa make up fewer than 5 percent of Morocco’s tourists, with the vast majority still from Europe.
Europe’s financial crisis poses a dilemma for the Moroccan economy as a whole, which is deeply intertwined with its neighbors across the Mediterranean.
Morocco’s main sources of hard currency – including foreign investment, tourism and remittances from its workers abroad – come overwhelmingly from Europe. On Dec. 20, the government reduced growth projections for 2012 by half a percentage point in response to Europe’s crisis.
“The world is entering a period of crisis. The next four or five years are not going to be years of prosperity,” said Nabil Akesbi, an economist who teaches at the Hassan II Institute for Agronomy in the capital Rabat.
For him, the Morocco Mall is part of a bet Morocco is making that it can become a kind of Dubai for the western Mediterranean, attracting consumers from across Africa and Europe to make up for weak local demand.
“It is a bit of a fragile model,” he said. “The success depends less on durable local demand than betting on foreign demand.”
The mall’s developers point to Morocco’s consistent growth rate of 4 percent to 5 percent for the past few years as a sign that the economy can support this kind of luxury shopping.
Those growth figures, however, are not producing jobs. Unemployment overall is at least 8 percent, while the jobless rate for those younger than 34 is a staggering 30 percent.
Pro-democracy demonstrations that rose up in Morocco last year have faded away, but millions of unemployed university graduates across the country still hold regular protests.
Investment has not been in sectors like industry that produce a lot of jobs, rather in retail, services and infrastructure that have not been creating the employment the nation needs, Mr. Akesbi said.
The economy is still at the whim of the annual agricultural harvest. Part of the reason for the country’s steady growth recently has been good weather.
“Here we are in 2011, and the economy is still largely determined by the sky,” Mr. Akesbi said.
About 25 percent of the economy relies on agriculture, but it employs 40 percent of the workforce, and a bad harvest can hurt other sectors.
The government dangerously overstretched its budget by increasing food subsidies and raising government salaries in a bid to stave off unrest sweeping the Arab world.
The mall project was conceived in the headier days of the mid-2000s when Morocco decided that what the country needed were more shopping centers.
While Europe falters, the wealthy oil states of the Gulf are playing a role in building a more consumerist Morocco.
Half of the funding for the Morocco Mall comes from the Saudi Al-Jedaie Group, which has built malls across Saudi Arabia.
