Turkmenistan begins capital expansion despite economic crisis

ASHGABAT: Authorities in Turkmenistan broke ground on what they say will be a major expansion of the capital Ashgabat on Tuesday, state media showed, despite the Central Asian country's long-running economic crisis.

The secretive authoritarian state is almost wholly dependent on natural gas exports and has struggled to recover from the global energy price slump in 2014 that battered the local manat currency and plunged many citizens into poverty.

But a state newspaper on Tuesday carried a pledge from autocrat leader Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov to continue investing "huge sums of money" to turn the capital into "one of the most prosperous cities in the world".

The grandiose project gets underway despite Berdymukhamedov noting in a rare admission earlier this year that the country was struggling to pare down foreign debt, and authorities have not disclosed a price tag or timeline for Ashgabat's expansion.

Berdymukhamedov acknowledged at the groundbreaking ceremony that sourcing materials could be challenging "because of the situation with the coronavirus" -- a disease his country has yet to acknowledge any cases of.

The ceremony took place the same day the capital -- whose name translates as "city of love" -- marked its 140th anniversary.

A Tuesday evening state television report showed Berdymukhamedov signing an order on the building of a new district, which will be called "Ashgabat City" and is expected to house more than 100,000 people -- some ten percent of the city's current population.

He was then shown shovelling the first cement of the new project.

Plans for the northern district shown on state television include a giant white and gold yurt as its centrepiece -- a symbolic reference to the Turkmen people's nomadic past.

Ashgabat holds the world record for "highest density of buildings made from white marble" along with several other obscure records that the regime has harnessed for propaganda purposes.

Human Rights Watch warned in 2020 that fallout from the pandemic had "drastically exacerbated Turkmenistan's pre-existing food crisis", which is particularly acute in the regions outside the capital.

In recent weeks, black market prices for the dollar in local currency have exceeded the official rate of 3.5 manats to the dollar by a factor of eight or nine.

The International Monetary Fund said Turkmenistan's economy grew 0.8 percent in 2020, a figure well short of the government's own estimate of 5.9 percent.