The struggle to tame Lagos

A walk along the two kilometers of light rail that Lagos
authorities have managed to build in three years gives a
sense of how hard it is to impose order on one of Africa’s
most chaotic cities.

From either side of the concrete structure – no track has
yet been laid – the crowded slums and highways of
Nigeria’s lagoon-side commercial hub teem with activity.
Its trademark yellow buses overtake, undertake and
force their way down impossibly narrow side streets,
where women stir pots next to canals clogged with
rubbish.


With between 15 million and 21 million people – the
upper estimate is the official one, though no one really
knows – and generating a third of GDP for Africa’s
second biggest economy, Lagos has become almost as
alluring to yield-hungry investors as it is to the 4,000 or
so economic migrants who turn up each day.
Violent crime, mushrooming slums, police extortion and
widespread fraud have often held investment back, but
in the past decade, authorities have started trying to
tackle some of the obstacles, especially maddening
traffic bottlenecks.


Just keeping Lagos roads moving without rail, pushing
that kind of tonnage just through our road network, now
that’s the eighth wonder of the world,” says Governor
Babtunde Fashola.
Fashola and his predecessor, Bola Tinubu, have tried to
turn the city from a byword for squalor into a glitzy
business hub. Their success will rest on projects like the
light rail, which has involved massive and controversial
slum clearance.

If they manage, it could become an investment hub in
Africa and a model for fast-urbanizing African nations. If
not, it might face a dystopian crime-ridden future not
unlike its past.


“WE CAN’T STOP THEM COMING”
If Lagos were a country its GDP would make it Africa’s
seventh biggest economy – more than twice the size of
Kenya’s. Its large consumer market is already well
established for firms like Unilever, Heineken and Nestle.
One of Africa’s biggest stock markets sits here, as does
its second biggest market in government bonds. Industry
is hampered by poor power generation, but the service
sector is booming.
Lagos accounts for more than half the non-oil economy
of Africa’s leading energy producer, says economist Paul
Collier, who sees it as key to breaking the country’s
dependence on oil.


“Lagos is Africa’s best chance of a productive megacity,”
he wrote in The Plundered Planet. “As oil runs down and
is replaced by a new economy … Nigeria’s economic
future lies in Lagos.”
But it faces a daily challenge just trying to keep up with
the pace of population growth, much of it on the edge of
water.


Nigeria, already pushing 170 million people, will be home
to 400 million by 2050, making it the world’s fourth most
populous country, according to the global Population
Reference Bureau (PRB). Lagos will have roughly doubled
in size by then, Fashola and demographers agree.
On top of Nigeria’s high birth rate, there is migration.
“The more successful Lagos is, the more people it
attracts. That’s the Catch-22,” said Kayode Akindele,
partner in a Lagos-based consultancy. “Social services
can’t keep up.”
Fashola’s planning commissioner Ben Akabueze thinks
Lagos could have 35 million people by 2025 on current
growth rates. In 1970, authorities say, there were just
1.4 million Lagosians.
“We can’t stop them from coming,” Akabueze told
Reuters from his office in mainland Lagos’s noisy,
heaving Ikeja district. “There’s been a net positive
migration almost on a daily basis.”
To try to cope better, the government is rolling out a
compulsory residents’ registration. “Everybody is
welcome,” Akabueze says. “But we want to document
the people who stay.”



VEHICLES FOR CHANGE
The influx puts pressure on inadequate housing, and
spawns unemployed youths with few options for making
a living outside the street gangs – the infamous ‘area
boys’ who informally control territory and extort money
from passers by.
But the biggest headache is travel. The transport
authority says there are 9 million road trips a day in the
city. Some Lagosians get up at 4.30 a.m. to make the
office by nine.
Things are improving; highways were widened and police
stationed at bottlenecks. New ferry services now beat
traffic by crossing the lagoon in a state one fifth of which
is water.
Tutu Adewale, an assistant to a financial professional,
used to spend three or four hours each way commuting
by bus along a tangle of bridges. Now it takes her 45
minutes by boat.
“I made do with it, but it’s such a relief now,” she said.


The $2.5 billion light rail project will take more time.
China’s state-owned China Civil Engineering Construction
Corporation (CCECC) began work in 2010, but there are
still 25 km left to build on the $1.3 billion east-west line,
and no work has started on the 35 km north-south one.
The project is behind schedule because there is barely a
stretch of land on which someone isn’t living or trading.
Thousands of illegal settlements erected by slum
dwellers have been destroyed this year. No one has been
compensated, because they were never supposed to be
there to begin with.


Amnesty International in August condemned the eviction
of 9,000 residents of Badia East and the razing of their
homes in February, leaving many to sleep in mosquito-
infested streets.
In one incident, 72 traders from the Igbo ethnic group
were deported to their ancestral lands after their houses
were bulldozed. That appeared to give slum clearance an
ugly ethnic dimension, and Fashola made a reluctant
public apology.
“My shop was just right in front of that bridge,” said Igbo
trader Uche Okonkwo, 43, surveying the wreckage of a
market trashed to make way for the rail. “They
demolished the warehouse, the shops, the offices, the
showroom, everything.”



FUTURE FOR THE POOR?
Fashola’s defenders say slums have to be removed if
projects like the light rail are to happen, but critics say
the heavy-handed approach shows a lack of sensitivity to
the poor.
The governor is fixing the city for the besuited business
types, they say, but has been slow on things like low-cost
housing to help those sleeping under bridges or on
rubbish tips.
“Much as I admire Fashola, I don’t see enough being
done to help those at the bottom,” blogger Tolu Ogunlesi
told Reuters in a chic art cafe in the prestigious Victoria
Island, an area housing one the world’s highest
concentrations of millionaires.
“They’re talking about building 1,000 low-cost housing
units a year, but we need hundreds of thousands a year,”
he said.


There’s no shortage of housing projects for the rich.
Moss-dusted colonial-era houses in leafy Ikoyi district are
becoming rare as they get torn down and swapped for
luxury flats.
At Bar Beach on the Atlantic Coast, tonnes of sand is
being poured into the ocean to reclaim it for the
proposed Eko Atlantic city, a Dubai-style gated
community that will have chrome skyscrapers, business
parks, palm trees and a marina.
Being on water is the only thing it will have in common
with the Makoko slum a few miles away, where 100,000
fishing people live in houses on stilts with no sanitation.


“MORE ACCOUNTABLE”
At his desk piled high with papers, Fashola resents the
notion he has neglected the poor. He points to projects
like massive mains water provision, which will when
finished provide 10-20 liters a day to Lagosians, even if
the city swells to 35 million, he says.
But the state’s message is: if you leave the poverty of
your village to live on the streets in Lagos, that’s your
lookout.
“If you have nowhere to stay, then stay in your village.
You can’t simply jump on a bus and come live under a
bridge,” Akabueze says.
The governor has won praise for dealing with crime.
Many area boys have been co-opted – some as yellow-
shirted traffic cops, while others keep order in bus
terminals.
Violent crime has steadily fallen since he took office in
2007, though there was been a spike in kidnapping this
year.

“There was a time security was a big problem, especially
robbery, but you have to hand it to them, things got a lot
better,” said Lagos tycoon Tony Elumelu.
Many fret about what will happen when the governor
steps down in 2015.
“Everything Fashola’s done can easily be reversed. You’d
just have to do nothing, it would be reversed,” said
Akindele.


Yet a growing number of business people feel the state’s
efforts to bring some kind of order to Lagos may be
becoming irreversible. Corruption is rife, but institutions
function; rubbish is collected, streets are swept, hedges
trimmed.
“Lagos is depersonalizing politics,” United Bank for Africa
CEO Philips Oduoza said. “Institutions are becoming
more important than people, and that could outlast the
governor.”
Reinforcing this are rocketing tax receipts; 65 percent of
state revenues are now non-oil.
The governor, who gets up at 7 a.m. and works until 3
a.m., says his to-do list isn’t getting any shorter.
“In a football match, the last 15 minutes can be the most
decisive,” he says, creaking back in his leather chair.
“So I intend to finish with as much pace as we started.


www.businessdayonline.com/2013/10/the-struggle-to-tame-lagos/

Who wrote this piece?.....this is the best piece on lagos I have read for a long time.

Neutral,comprehensive and analytical....by the way am igbo!

billante: Who wrote this piece?.....this is the best piece on lagos I have read for a long time.

Neutral,comprehensive and analytical.... by the way am igbo !

who cares

billante: Who wrote this piece?.....this is the best piece on lagos I have read for a long time.

Neutral,comprehensive and analytical....by the way am igbo!

You scared bruh!?

iterator25: who cares

Maltina does!

and ASUU strike stil continues

iterator25: who cares

^^^Not your type that's for sure!