Capital Gains
Lagos’s dynastic government prefers to service rich over poor, and shows no sign of losing its grip.
Words Pete Guest
Illustration Josh McKenna
When Lagos State governor Babatunde Fashola came to Singapore, Shabbir Hassanbhai used to take him to the Tower Club, overlooking Marina Bay from 40 storeys high. Fashola, who ran Nigeria’s commercial capital between 2007 and 2015, would talk about how the two countries saw the Asian city state as a model for Lagos’ development, and would press Hassanbhai, Singapore’s non-resident ambassador to Nigeria, on everything from anti-corruption to creating and maintaining urban green space.
The two countries gained independence from Britain within a few years of each other in the early 1960s. Today, few places seem more distinct in character and temperament than sedate, pristine Singapore, and Lagos, the clogged financial heart of West Africa — an ever-evolving riot of diesel smoke, trash and noise draped across a marshy archipelago on the Gulf of Guinea.
“The governor asked me, ‘What’s missing?’” Hassanbhai says. “‘What do you have that we don’t?’” Hassanbhai’s answer, simply, was “execution”. Singapore’s late autocratic visionary, Lee Kuan Yew, was a mythical figure in the city-state. He oversaw relentless improvements to infrastructure and housing, underpinned by an obsession for detail and a belief that every element of the city’s design — from its draconian laws on littering to its trade policy — mattered to the success of the whole.
Although neither can claim to have matched Lee’s vision, modern Lagos has been shaped by two men: Fashola and his mentor and predecessor, Bola Tinubu. Tinubu took over in 1999 as Nigeria’s military junta handed over to civilian rule. After two terms he was succeeded by his chief of staff, Fashola. Today’s governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, is widely seen as continuing the dynasty — handpicked by Tinubu to further his legacy.
Ambode will be the first governor of Lagos since the return to democracy with the support of the nation’s ruling party. In March, a shock landslide propelled the opposition All Progressives Congress — of which Ambode is a member — into government, on the back of widespread discontent over corruption, inequality and insecurity. Up until now, Lagos has been run as a place apart, a megacity-state with international heft and pull.
“The rich live in multi-million dollar gated compounds while the poor scrape by in corrugated iron shacks.”
Nigeria is Africa’s largest economy and, with 175 million citizens, its most populous country. Around 12.6 million people live in Lagos, and Lagos state has a GDP of $91 billion — almost twice the size of Ghana — and the city is riding the wave of international investment that has accompanied a new, ‘Africa Rising’ narrative, replacing the imagery of poverty and conflict that dominated TV screens in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, for all their remaining challenges, African countries are hyped up by global banks as the investment destinations of the future; consumer goods companies are swarming to tap low but rising income markets. With only a few exceptions, the economies of almost all of sub-Saharan Africa’s 48 countries have grown steadily for a decade.
Although 90 per cent of Nigeria’s export revenue comes from oil and gas, the internal economy has spun away from hydrocarbon dependence and now boasts huge finance, telecommunications, media and finance industries, and Lagos is the centre of all of them. From the city’s Victoria Island, Nigerian banks have spread across the continent, while the vast majority of sub-Saharan Africa’s film output is filmed in its streets and villas.
With that explosive growth comes the question of how to reconcile the city’s wealthiest denizens with its vast population of poor. The former live in multi-million dollar gated compounds on the man-made Banana Island, while the latter scrape by in corrugated iron shacks or wooden stilt houses that sprout like fungi out of the sheltered sections of the lagoon. The city has an estimated 9,500 millionaires, but its GDP per capita is below $5,600. Between 60 and 65 per cent of Nigerians live on less than $1.25 per day. The promise of employment and wealth has drawn in millions of migrants from across Nigeria and West Africa, but most are absorbed by the informal sector — hawking or day labouring.
Historically, the Lagosian approach to growth has been to up sticks and move on, creating a new centre when the old one has filled to capacity. These new areas typically cater to the wealthy, who are looking for fresh property, untainted by the city’s uglier side. Each time Lagos is rebuilt, it is rebuilt for the rich.
On the edge of Victoria Island, next to Bar Beach — a dirty strip of sand overlooking the Atlantic — a new polyp of land has been reclaimed from the sea to house the Eko Atlantic City, the new financial and upmarket residential centre of Lagos. The artists’ renderings of the new city are all mirrored glass and dramatic lines — the visual language of Singapore or Dubai.
“There has tended to be a displacement where it comes to urbanisation processes where we go for new-build and greenfield developments, essentially, rather than addressing urban issues in existing settlements,” says Ore Disu, a Lagosian urbanist and director of the Nsibidi Institute, a social think tank.
“There’s an idea that in the expansion of the city we should also aspire to new architectural and visual ideals, which is very much in line with the megacity narrative being pushed around at the moment. This new city, or these new anchors, are not really being built for the majority.”
“Each time Lagos is rebuilt, it is rebuilt for the rich.”
Lagos’ monied class exists in a stratosphere above most of its citizens. Many made their money in the oil and gas or finance sectors; others are from well-connected political families who have been able to take advantage of the complex subsidy regimes and government contracts. They are part of an international class, owning property in London, shopping in the UAE. Eko Atlantic’s Dubai-inspired design is a reflection of its target audience, and as much as it represents Lagos’ ambition, it is a manifestation of the city’s yawning wealth gap.
To the east of Lagos is Lekki — another lagoon that now houses a satellite community complete with golf course, industrial park and port, connected to the main city by a gleaming new toll road. Developments such as this have annexes for the staff, drivers and other support workers, themselves an emerging middle class that exists in part to service the wealthy. Attracted by the upper middle class and the high net worth individuals on Banana Island and Victoria Island, the private sector is driving construction of luxury malls and housing developments while the majority of the city is left neglected.
Lagos is crowded, with too many people seeking too few opportunities. The population pressure has already overwhelmed the infrastructure: the whole of Nigeria suffers from perennial power shortages, and diesel generators tick over constantly in the backyards of houses and businesses to make up for the weaknesses in the grid. Power challenges have been exacerbated in recent months by a shortage of petrol — ironic for a country that is sub-Saharan Africa’s largest exporter of crude oil, but also typical, since the country has to import most of its refined petroleum products. The roads are so rammed with cars that ‘rush hour’ lasts from mid-afternoon well into the evening, most of it spent near-stationary. Earlier this year, the courier company DHL had to get a licence to move packages by boat around the city, because it was becoming too difficult to meet its deadlines at street level.
Disu is hopeful that the Lagos government is waking up to the longer-term needs of its city by trying to create a polycentric model, whereby each district has its own infrastructure and purpose, ending the roving circus that follows each new commercial development. They are also trying to fix the transport, increasing citizens’ mobility with a new metro rail service and licences for mass transit on water. However, for the time being money is still flowing towards money, and to a monied vision of the city.
“The only way you can maintain the artist’s image of Eko Atlantic is literally to sanitise that city, to take all of the Nigerians out.”
Some experts fear that modernisation and privatisation of much of the city’s space will create conflict with its existing character. “If you see the renderings of Eko Atlantic, it reminds you of Dubai,” says Professor Francis Owusu, an expert in African urbanisation. “The only way you can maintain the artist’s image of Eko Atlantic is to sanitise that city; to take all of the Nigerians out.”
To allow a privately-driven vision of Lagos that caters to a small, international class of people would create tension and conflict, Owusu believes — no city can afford to become homogenised or exclusive.
“We keep on having this vision of African cities that look more Western than African,” he says. “Cities are the result of the cultural context in which they emerge. A city that has little to do with the culture in which it is situated is not functional because it doesn’t meet the needs of its people.”
The dynastic succession of Tinubu to Fashola to Ambode could be a sign that Lagosian politics, far from being caught up in the wave of change that swept the nation in March, are calcifying. The three men represent an elite that has more in common with the inhabitants of the glass towers of Eko Atlantic than of the stilt villages. Through design or inaction, they have focussed on transplanting a new Singapore in the middle of Lagos, rather than on applying Lee’s principles to raise up the city that was there to begin with.
This is article is from Weapons of Reason’s second issue: Megacities.
Weapons of Reason is a publishing project to understand and articulate the global challenges shaping our world by Human After All design agency.
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