Aiming for the bright lights in Lagos
The undertaking symbolizes the slow turnaround of Lagos, a megacity crammed with 21 million people enduring rolling blackouts, overflowing sewage and snarling traffic—urban woes that are the legacy of bureaucratic mismanagement. Lately, though, Lagos has begun to pretty up. The government has hired litter crews to tidy highways. It has contracted engineers to string up […]
The undertaking symbolizes the slow turnaround of Lagos, a megacity crammed with 21 million people enduring rolling blackouts, overflowing sewage and snarling traffic—urban woes that are the legacy of bureaucratic mismanagement.
Lately, though, Lagos has begun to pretty up. The government has hired litter crews to tidy highways. It has contracted engineers to string up traffic signals. And it has paid landscapers to plant playgrounds under highway bridges, formerly no-go zones, popular with teenage toughs.
Now, on once shadowy streets, lights come on when evening falls. It’s a gift from the Lagos State Electricity Board, a previously near-defunct agency whose own headquarters went without regular electricity until two years ago. Having brought its office generators back to life, the board is attempting to light the entire city—first the thoroughfares, then roads and alleys.
In a country with hollowed-out basic services, working street lamps send a simple message of what government can give. “The first time when we [turn] on the light, the expression of people, you feel their joy,” said Rauph Murtadah, an electrician with the board. “You feel the joy of making an impact on society.”
Still, this unruly city can sabotage even best-felt gestures. Lights don’t always stay on, for a variety of reasons. Thieves yank out and sell cables for valuable copper inside. Gunmen sometimes slice wires to plunge neighbourhoods into darkness before a robbery. And taxis routinely take out lights when they lose their brakes, crashing into poles. “They knock down poles like it is bowling pins,” said Damilola Ogunbiyi, general manager of the Lagos electricity board.
Two years ago, fresh from working on electrical infrastructure for London’s financial district—the City of London—Mrs. Ogunbiyi took on this post. The chance to light a sprawling metropolitan area from scratch enticed her. “I’m one of these people that feel like street lighting can change the world,” she said.
She spent her first month helping screw light bulbs into sockets in the board’s ransacked building; she had abandoned cars towed from its entry way; and she encouraged the few remaining staffers to work on past noon.
These days, her crews pull morning to midnight shifts, as they try to brighten some 9,000 roads. So far, they’ve lighted a few hundred. And when car wrecks and thieves bring those streetlights down, these workers grab their tools and head out for repairs.
Mrs. Ogunbiyi is among the swell of Nigerians coming home to work with the government. Others have left stagnant Europe to come build Lagos’s nascent subway line, to landscape city parks and to staff the governor’s office.
The prodigals invigorate a bureaucracy that has made Nigeria among the most difficult places to do business, the World Bank says. Expectations on them are high, given Lagos’s captious press and democratic local elections that ushered a reformist opposition into power—uncommon in a country where hired gunmen often rig and mar elections.
Mrs. Ogunbiyi’s electricity board isn’t authorized to address Lagos’s biggest problem—the blackouts. That job falls to federal government. So she’s focused on street lamps. She plans to light up the city’s plywood markets, its office tower skyline and maybe stage abstract light shows in pitch-black crooks under bridges.
She could light it all in five years if the government would accelerate its slow-crawling plan to privatize the power sector before 2015, a programme that should attract billions of dollars to revive decrepit power plants, economists say. But for now, 88% of Mrs. Ogunbiyi’s maintenance budget goes to feeding diesel generators that flip on when the power goes out, she says.
Recently, her team scored a small triumph. Despite a broken-down utility truck, a shouting match with a road-raged driver and a stolen cable spool, five workmen replaced a bulb for streetlight number 46 on Adebola Street. “It was a mission accomplished for the day,” said Akinyemi Qazem, as the cherry picker crane lowered him back to the road.
The harder job is repair work. On Moloney Street, a wire frayed, forcing the teeming neighbourhood into candlelight. The roar of generators, pop music, and a fist fight vied with the jackhammer, as electricians tore up a stretch of sidewalk to extract a problematic wire that they’d buried to prevent theft. “Since 10 a.m. we’ve been digging all this,” said Bode Layeni. It was 9 p.m. and he was fumbling for a roll of electrical tape in the dark as he listed the five children he rarely sees, except on Sundays.
“We don’t have a choice,” said another electrician, holding the flashlight while Mr. Layeni added: “It has to be done.”