Lagos City In 2009

Nigerian Lagos has improved. It has become cleaner and, a bit less disorderly...Many obstructive structures have been dismantled. Formally barren patches of land and brief bushes used as ad hoc toilets have become beautifully en-flowered.
Some of the centres of stench in Lagos, such as Oshodi and Mile-12 markets have become freer from squalor than they had been a couple of years previously.
Okada (commercial transporters with motorcycles) and Danfo (Second-hand commercial town-service bus) drivers have started showing signs of reformability. Many things were gaining some appearance of sanity.

But these might be an expensive painting on the face of Nigeria; not an actual change of her texture.




There is an Ideo-nomenclatural singsong flooding radio waves and pages of newsbooks: Lagos to be made into a megacity. This sounds somewhat queer in the context of Nigeria. Whatever the propounders meant...

In socio-political transactions, often, words (names) define concepts and shape expectations; even when they did not affect basic reality.

If the quantific title "mega", when grafted to the word "city" evokes the concept of a large and expansive conglomeration of towns under one municipal authority; if it means a place where people of all technics and creed live; where more and more markets and set in excercise; where more and more commerce takes place; where social, cultural and even scientific projects are undertaken; if megacity is a large, large, city where all categories of good (harmless) people are allowed to come and live rightfully and responsibly, then Lagos is not transmuting into a megacity ! The proper word for the 'new Lagos' project, I think, is decongestation. Lagos is being decongested.


But the financial names attached to the project (dozens of millions of Dollars, and hundreds of billions of Naira) are too jumbo for de-congestation only.


The Seamy Side Of Ii: Mega-City For mega People
With regard to the geography and topography of Lagos, the appelation "megaCity" seems a ruse to set Lagos city as a place where only people of certain heights of income and ruling-class connection will live as standard citizens.
Which do people need: cities or a mega-city? A true mega-city in Nigeria...in this nation of concentrated dirty, hungry, semi-literate souls? It is expensive. The project is too costly, not only in construction fees but also in its displacemental effects. Hundreds times thousands of people, many of them having legitimate, government-authorized rights of occupancy have been displaced. Plural categories of artisans have been strongly affected. Many of them are being driven out of the city or out of business. And many other woes apparently not fore-considered.
Of course, this is inevitable. Lagos is nearly fully saturated, though not so fully occupied (in Magodo and Lekki areas are many un-occupied buildings...). Any significant new structures would have to displace old ones, or entail a resource-draining preliminary of land reclamation.
I think there is more need for more moderate cities than there is for a ten-lane-highway megacity.
But the gravest threat to this and such projects is the attitude of the Nigerian Lagosian, the contracors. They charge ten dollars for a piece of one-dollar work and use one cent in actually doing it. Even untrained eyes could see that they are not developing the city. They are setting the stage for more and more contracts for the same projects in short intervals. Plus the thugs who rob people in the cover of enforcing Lagos State law.
In Relation To All NigeriaTo me, however the authorities came by that concept, they seemed not to have opened their minds' sight to the diverse inevitable and probable consequences of, and alternative to it. Re-cleaning the city of Lagos, any city, is a worthy venture. But without buffer arrangements, it defeats itself. The miseries are too much.

Whenever I think of how Brasilia (Brazil) was born from Rio de Janeiro; New Delhi (India) from Old Delhi; how Moscow (Russia)grew; some towns in northern Italy; some big towns in Sweden; even the two nearest neighbours: Ouagadougou (BurkinaFaso) and Accra (Ghana) which are in similar processes of expansion and modernization, I feel that there is some dumbness in this mega city thing. The legislative interaction that approved it as it is being done bore some shortness of sight. Building a jumbo-city now in the midst of languishing villages is like writing a good sentence in big, bold, letters on a tiny piece of paper. The intended mark cannot be complete, comprehensive or comprehensible. And it cannot be enduringly viable.

Supercities such as Cairo, London, Moscow, Tokyo et cetera naturally grew. Or were planned far-sightedly, developed (and modified) into maga status, gradually. Smaller towns in those countries grew too, both in infrastructure and population. Mega-cityhood was not imposed on them. They did not borrow to enjoy luxury.

*Lagos can only be renovated; it cannot be expanded...unless by ignoring state boundaries.
*Within the perimeter of the geographic enclave that is called Nigeria, there are many "town-worthy" or "city-worthy" expanses.
*Most villages in Nigeria are forgotten of government, except in tax collection, done by the rapacious entities called Local Government Authority.
*Most young people are continuing to think of the cities, especially Lagos, as their best destination in the search for better living; which is a grand illusion.
Most of the displaced in Lagos may not stay away. They may return, probably not as artisans (block-makers, mechanics, keepers of livestock including topiary men...) that they had been but as jobless people, unsupported by the village and unaccommodated by the city.

Were villages not in government's oblivion, or new towns being set up from time to time with facilities that enhance creativity and productivity in human endeavours, those obstructive, "illegal" structures demolished might not have arisen. Lagos would have naturally got de-congested. Or its "overcrowdedness" would not have been as it had.


Mr. 'Tunde Fashola, the political chief of Lagos, may be doing his best. There are palpable, verifiable facts. But the gentleman might be writing his name in big, bold letters on a very tiny scraplet of paper.
Certainly, the jumbo project is not entirely inapproprate. But more certainly, it would not amount to significant advancement in the development of Nigeria...

I think the legislators, leasers and renters of contracts, would be more blame-worthy if this capital-intensive updatement of Lagos gives some big, undesirable, consequence...on smaller, neglected towns in the country. Of course, it is already potentiating migrtaory imbalances. Large proportions of the city would still be forced back to slumminess...


May be, one of the assumptions that nag me is a fact: that a nation in decomposition (disintegration) usually embarks on bombastic, peaceful or peaceless, unedifying, projects. USSR, Jugoslavia...


So, without building mega-villages along, we will have to go for giga-city and other titles of jumboism.


Beyond 40 kilometres, the metropolitan aura of development of Lagos peters out into neglected settlements, some which are larger than Lagos .
Meanwhile, it is like digging up earth from the floor of the house to beautify the frontyard. A nice, if not glorious, deception.

That's how I feel from 40 kilometres inland away from Lagos city.