URE at won’t stop growing
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