A mountain of refuse collapsed at Dar Es Salam, Conakry’s largest landfill, in the early hours of Sunday 23 August, after heavy rain that began around 2am saturated the waste heap and triggered a landslide. The collapse buried nearby shacks and tents in the Gbessia commune. Guinea’s government put the death toll at 30, with six people seriously injured and 16 more slightly hurt. Search and rescue teams used excavators to clear the site through the day. Prime Minister Amadou Oury Bah visited Sunday to assess the damage and oversee the response.
The detail that turns this from a weather disaster into an infrastructure story is the timing. Four days earlier, on Thursday 20 August, Guinea’s Minister of Territorial Administration, Djenab Touré, had announced that the government was closing Dar Es Salam because it posed a safety risk, with plans to relocate waste operations outside Conakry. The closure decision came first. The collapse came before relocation could happen. That sequence is the story: the risk had already been identified and named publicly by the government itself, not something that caught authorities by surprise.
This is not a uniquely Guinean failure mode. Landfill collapses during heavy rain have killed dozens in Kampala in 2024 and in other fast-growing, underregulated cities across West Africa, where waste sites often sit close to informal housing because land elsewhere is scarce or contested. What distinguishes Conakry’s case is that the gap between identifying a risk and acting on it was measured in days, not years, which makes it a sharper test case than most. A closure order is a policy decision. Physically relocating a capital city’s waste stream, building or designating an alternative site, moving equipment and workers, is a capital and logistics project that takes months at minimum. The four-day gap here was never going to be enough, and treating the announcement as if it had already solved the problem would have been the wrong reading even before Sunday.
What to watch: whether the government publishes a concrete relocation timeline and site for Conakry’s waste operations, rather than repeating the closure announcement in different words; whether other landfills or informal settlements previously flagged as high-risk receive the same accelerated attention this one is now getting in hindsight; and whether compensation or resettlement support for displaced residents near Dar Es Salam is addressed explicitly, since the shacks the landslide buried were, by definition, built in a zone authorities had already deemed unsafe enough to close.