The city that won’t stop growing

A thick layer of acrid, blue smoke hovers just above the waterfront slums that skirt Lagos lagoon, filtering out sunrise and sunset.  This man-made mist that clings to the rusted shack rooftops comes from the countless fish-smoking cabins that drive the slum economy.   There’s an uninterrupted view of the city’s dramatic sprawl of poverty […]

A thick layer of acrid, blue smoke hovers just above the waterfront slums that skirt Lagos lagoon, filtering out sunrise and sunset. 

This man-made mist that clings to the rusted shack rooftops comes from the countless fish-smoking cabins that drive the slum economy.  

There’s an uninterrupted view of the city’s dramatic sprawl of poverty from the road bridges that carry daily commuters between the islands and the mainland. 

Fishing and sand-dredging boats drift to work, heading deep into the lagoon. 

Many of the slums’ wooden huts are on stilts, others are just basic shacks shoddily built on the unstable ground of trodden-down rubbish dumps. 

Nobody knows exactly how many people live in Lagos, but they all agree on one thing – Nigeria’s biggest city is growing at a terrifying rate. 

The UN says 14 million. The Lagos State government thinks it’s nearer 21 million, as rural Nigerians are drawn by the hope of a better life to one of Africa’s few mega-cities. 

By 2050 Nigeria will have twice the population it has today, more than half will live in cities, and about 60% of them will be under 25. 

In an overcrowded neighbourhood on mainland Lagos, Muktar Abdulhamid, 36, is pressing shirts with a heavy, old-fashioned iron filled with charcoals. 

Abdulhamid is from a rural village in the northern state of Kano, and he’s left his wife and one-year-old child at home and come here to try to make money. 

 “This isn’t what I intended to be doing. I want to do business – to buy and sell,” he says. “It’s not easy to leave your wife, your child, it’s lonely, but I have no choice – it’s for the future of the family.” 

There are few good jobs and housing is in high demand, but at least there are opportunities. 

Every week tens of thousands of people arrive in Lagos, heading to neighbourhoods where friends and relatives have come before – many end up in the slums.  

But Lagos State is planning tower blocks and transformation, reclaiming land from the sea for ambitious new developments. 

In a rush to transform the city, the waterfront slums are being cleared, court rulings are being ignored, and luxury apartment blocks are springing up. 

In about 30 years Nigeria will overtake the US to become the world’s third most populated country behind China and India. 

It vies with South Africa for the status of the continent’s biggest economy, but it’s now in recession – beset by a drop in oil prices, and having to fund the fight against both Boko Haram Islamists and separatists targeting oil pipelines in the Niger Delta. 

Like everywhere else in Africa trying to break out of poverty, Nigeria hopes fast population growth will bring it a “demographic dividend” – a young workforce that can drive economic growth. If they can all be put to work. 

Already there’s migration north to Libya and on to Europe, and the young who are left idle and without much hope are easily radicalised by Boko Haram. 

It’s going to take great management, smart politics and increasing security and stability to turn rapid population growth into a positive and avoid the potential for disaster. 

The towers 

Lagos is crowded, chaotic, and crumbling. 

In the slums of the old city the spirits of the dead appear to have returned to cleanse it of evil and pray for its peace and prosperity. 

The tall men, wrapped in white, jump and crouch, sweeping their long sticks at the crowd. 

Their heads are veiled and topped with brightly coloured hats, as they spin through the streets towards the palace of their “Oba” – the king of Lagos. 

The Eyo Festival usually marks the death of the city’s most important or influential people, but this ceremony – the first in seven years – is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Lagos State. 

The original spot where 15th Century Yoruba fishermen settled on Lagos Island is now an edgy, poor, densely packed neighbourhood. 

Degraded buildings lean into each other, appearing to sag under the weight of people packing the balconies to watch the procession. 

The roads are potholed, there are few schools or clinics, let alone parks or playing fields – it desperately needs a new lease of life. 

“Lagos has no choice but to go up,” says Lateef Sholebo, head of Lagos State Urban Renewal Agency. 

“How are we going to accommodate all the population? There is no way we can continue to sprawl.”After 25 years as a city planner in Los Angeles, he has now returned home to put into practice the lessons of urban renewal he has learned. 

Emerging from the rusty tin rooftops and towering above the Eyo parade route is a multi-storey apartment block – a gleaming, modern show home rising from the slum. 

“This project is very important because it shows the people in the community how a slum area can be transformed from what it used to be to a more modern, more sustainable environment,” he says, enthusiastically. 

Eleven families lived on the land – they were persuaded to combine their plots and stay elsewhere while the 48-flat tower block was built. 

Now they have 11 modern apartments to move into – and 37 extra new homes for their neighbours. 

“The air-space is useless – nobody is using it. Now we are able to go vertical we can reduce the overcrowding,” says Sholebo. 

“If we are able to convince all the rest of the families to participate in this kind of programme I think it’s better for them, it’s better for the government – and it’s better for everybody.” 

But it took years to build and was hugely expensive – too expensive for the government to roll out across Lagos. 

The city needs to be rebuilt without moving whole communities out. 

That’s where Sholebo’s American experience could make the difference – using imaginative tax tricks to generate finance for the infrastructure to bring in private developers. 

“We have to come up with different ways, or creative ways to provide such affordable housing,” says Sholebo. 

But those with the money to invest are looking for better returns elsewhere.   

The jobs machine  

The newly-trained staff in the glossy new Lagos factory are carefully packing phones into boxes. 

As production lines go it’s small, but for “the first indigenous mobile, tablet, phone and computer assembly plant in Nigeria,” at least it’s a start. 

The company, Afrione, wants to tap into the big market for devices that a fast-growing young population provides, by producing cheap phones and tablets with the tagline “Made in Nigeria”. 

At the moment at least 90% of the components are imported, but company director Lekan Akinjide wants to steadily decrease that by 4 or 5% a year. 

“What we are actually doing fundamentally is starting the process – no-one else has really tried, no one else has really invested in a factory and the training of a skilled workforce,” he says. 

“We’ve looked at China, we’ve looked at India, we’ve also looked at what people have done here and tried not to make the mistakes they have made.” 

China had a fast growing population. It had deep and pervasive poverty, it was a rural economy and it turned itself around in a generation, mainly through manufacturing. 

But the window of time to take advantage of the “demographic dividend” is short – lots of jobs are needed now – and it’s perhaps worth looking a little closer to home. 

There are some places in Africa where a new industrial revolution is seen as the key to putting the idle youth to work and cashing in on a growing population. 

Ethiopia’s economy is dwarfed by that of Nigeria, but it’s the continent’s fastest growing and is betting it all on massive infrastructure investment and an industrial revolution to transform a nation of farmers into makers. 

There are beautiful new six-lane highways, an electric railway line to the ocean, and vast estates of social housing are being built with government-run mortgage schemes to get the poor on the housing ladder. 

And Nigeria knows massive investment in infrastructure is the answer to a growing economy and to get a congested city moving. 

The population is even outgrowing the supply of electricity. Generators which fill the gaps are a constant background soundtrack to the city.  

“There’s a lot of new infrastructure being built, but… the effects are not felt by the common man.” 

Stage one of Nigeria’s first electric railway line – through Lagos – is almost finished, but it can’t start moving a quarter of a million people a day from the suburbs to the city until its own power station is up and running. 

“There’s a lot of new infrastructure being built, but it’s skewed and the effects are not felt by the common man,” says planning expert Taibat Lawanson. 

“There’s a gap between the rich and the poor.” 

She believes by just improving transport links between residential suburbs and downtown, the government is missing the point – new satellite cities have to be planned and built so people can work near their homes and avoid commuting. 

“The government has got to understand that people are going to keep coming. 

“The current thinking is that they need to reverse urbanisation and get people to go back to the villages and stay away, but that’s not going to work.”  

The luxury waterfront developer Paul Onwuanibe says inequality is everywhere, but he believes it’s “a little more acute, or visible” in Lagos. 

“That’s just part and parcel of mega-cities, but one of the things the government would have to think of is some kind of social platform… some sort of welfare platform that catches people below a certain safety net. 

“As this country and this city develops, you will see the gap bridged to some extent.  

“There will be a lot of people that will always remain under the poverty line just because of the sheer numbers,” he says, but believes the trickle-down from a growing economy and better private sector will see more people better off. 

So what does Steve Ayorinde, the Lagos Governor and State spokesman, think the city will look like in 50 years? 

“The pride of the black race,” he answers quickly. “Where technology will drive practically everything.” 

He talks about making Lagos a “smart city” – but millions of people living in slums just want better education and health, somewhere to live and somewhere to work. 

“Just build modern houses for us – we are happy with where we are living,” says Moses Sangoloke, a long-time resident of the threatened Ago Egun fishing slum, who chairs the community development association. 

The government knows it needs to build. The people will keep coming. Lagos will keep growing. 

Culled from BBC