After months of threats from his landlord, visits to the police and a court hearing, Djibril Diagne came home on New Year’s Day to find the water had been cut off. Today, Diagne, his second wife and five children use outdoor taps to wash and cook. Opposite their dark flat in a scruffy suburb some 15 kilometres (nine miles) from central Dakar, workmen swing shovels on a building site, as horse-drawn carts travel up and down earth roads. The tenants above and below him have both left, says the 64-year-old electrician, from a faux-leather armchair in his threadbare living room.