Light rail project to help transform bustling Lagos
A walk along the 2km 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 21-million people generating a third of gross domestic product
(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.
Governor Babatunde 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, Lagos could become an investment hub in Africa and a
model for fast-urbanising African nations. If not, it might face a
dystopian crime-ridden future not unlike its past.
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 Nestlé.
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 the
key to breaking the country’s dependence on oil.
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. 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 that Lagos
could have 35-million people by 2025 on present growth rates. In 1970,
authorities say, there were just 1.4-million Lagosians. “We can’t stop
them from coming,” Akabueze says in his Lagos office. “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,” he says. “But we want to document the people who stay.”
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 4.30am to make the office by 9am.
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 day commuting by bus along a tangle of
bridges. Now it takes her 45 minutes by boat.
The $2.5 billion light rail project will take more time.
China’s state-owned China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation
began work in 2010, but there are still 25km left to build on the $1.3
billion east-west line, and no work has started on the 35km north-south
one.
The project is behind schedule because there is barely a stretch of
land on which someone is not living or trading. Thousands of illegal
settlements erected by slum dwellers have been destroyed this year.
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.
The governor’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, the critics 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 said in a chic art cafe in
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.”
There is 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 replaced by luxury flats.
At Bar Beach, on the Atlantic coast, tonnes of sand are being poured
into the ocean to reclaim land for the Eko Atlantic city, a Dubai-style
gated community that will have chrome skyscrapers, business parks and a
marina.
Being on water is the only thing it will have in common with the
Makoko slum a few kilometres away, where 100,000 fishing people live in
houses on stilts with no sanitation.
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, when finished, will provide 10l-20l 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 traffic cops, while others keep order in bus
terminals.
Violent crime has steadily fallen since he took office in 2007, though there was a spike in kidnapping this year.
“There was a time when security was a big problem, especially
robbery, but you have to hand it to them, things got a lot better,” says
Lagos tycoon Tony Elumelu.
Many fret about what will happen when the governor steps down in
2015. “Everything Fashola has done can easily be reversed. You’d just
have to do nothing, it would be reversed,” says 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 depersonalising politics,” United Bank for Africa CEO
Philips Oduoza says. “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. And the governor says his to-do list is not
getting any shorter.
By: Tim Cocks
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