‘We don’t want power, we want lights’: Madagascar awaits post-Rajoelina era | Protests News
Antananarivo, Madagascar – On a typical Sunday morning in Mahamasina, a suburb of Madagascar’s capital Antananarivo, Sarobidy Ramarimanana joined the queue at her neighbourhood water point just after sunrise.“I just wanted to fill my jerrycan and go to church,” she told Al Jazeera. “I was about to draw water when people started running; jerrycans everywhere.” The sound of police sirens had sparked panic, interrupting the calm of the neighbourhood as people fled.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listAfter weeks of tense antigovernment protests – and a crackdown that turned deadly – fear has become instinct, Ramarimanana said. People ran, tripping over their jerrycans, scattering them across the street. “I picked mine up and ran, too. I was scared.”The 22-year-old student returned home, but she went back “angry”, she said, frustrated by the years of severe power and water supply cuts, sometimes lasting for days at a time, and the government’s failure to deliver improvements to such services.She…
