Lagos now wears a new look
AN OFT-TOLD tale of Lagos’s once-notorious traffic jams is that of a taxi passenger stuck in a snarl-up who left the vehicle, wandered into a roadside restaurant to eat, drank a beer, took a nap and returned to the vehicle that had not moved an inch. He reached his destination several hours later.
First-time visitors to Lagos about 10 years ago were warned: “This is Lagos.” That meant that you should not expect help from anyone – but brace for hard times.
Fast forward to 2016 and the traffic congestion, high crime rate, clogged gutters and roads filled with garbage could soon become just a bad dream. These days Lagosians still regale each other with anecdotes of the dystopian city even as positive changes can be seen in Africa’s most populous city, with 21 million people. These days the greeting “welcome to Lagos” portends better news.
The transformation of Lagos started during the tenure of Bola Tinubu, Lagos State governor from 1999 to 2007. Tinubu set forth a rescue operation that his successor, Babatunde Fashola, later continued.
There were political and economic benefits for such efforts. “Lagos is Nigeria’s richest state, producing about $90 billion (R1.3 trillion) a year in goods and services,” notes the Economist.
A fast-growing population (600 000 people added annually), without commensurate improvements in social services such as housing, water and transportation, had pushed Lagos to the cliff’s edge.
There have been impressive infrastructural developments, but the plan to create a “new city” at the edge of Lagos is probably the most audacious. Dubbed the “Manhattan of Africa”, Eko Atlantic on Victoria Island consists of 10 million square metres of land reclaimed from the ocean and protected by an 8.5km-long seawall.
New city
Construction began in 2008, and it consists of seven districts along the ocean front, including a business district expected to host major banks and insurance and oil companies, as well as the Nigerian stock exchange.
Lagos’s government reduced crime rates by providing logistical support to the police force run by the federal government. It installed closed-circuit television in most parts of the city and established skills-acquisition programmes for the “area boys” – youths, mostly jobless, who extort money from drivers and passengers. It also set up mobile courts to summarily try cases.
Oshodi market, located about 8km from Murtala Mohammed International Airport, used to represent the good, the bad and the ugly of Lagos: thousands of people to-ing and fro-ing; a cacophony of voices at the highest decibels; rickety buses meandering through a sea of human beings; pickpockets on the prowl; people fighting at one end, others dancing to loud music at the other end.
Currently, most of what used to be Oshodi market has been demolished, to make way for a “world-class bus terminus”, according to government officials.
Fashola regarded Oshodi’s transformation as a watershed moment. During his tenure, he often reminded Lagosians that, having transformed Oshodi, there was nothing they could not achieve.
Lagos is becoming a clean city. Thousands of workers can be seen late every night sweeping the roads and taking away the dirt.
An efficient garbage-collection service supports the cleaning efforts. More than 1 million tons of waste was deposited in public landfills last year, up from 71 000 tons in 2004. About 72 percent of Lagos residents currently use a government-regulated waste-disposal service; in 2005 only 42 percent used such a service.
Just before Tinubu took over as governor in 1999, the BBC reported that “the realities of Lagos may thwart Tinubu’s ambitious plans: the city is collapsing as fast as it grows, disappearing under a mountain of rubbish”. But after 15 years of painstaking efforts, that image of Lagos is slowly changing.
After Tinubu exited, Fashola’s strategy was focused on three fronts. First, he solicited citizens’ support for a new vision of Lagos. The slogan Eko o ni baje (Lagos must not spoil) rallied Lagosians against the status quo.
Second, he reformed the tax system, which resulted in an increase in tax revenues to $115 million a month last year, up from $3.2m in 1999. Tax compliance increased to 80 percent, up from about 30 percent in 2005.
Third, Fashola used the tax revenues to undertake ambitious transportation and sanitation projects, including the creation of a rail network, bus lanes and a wastecollection system, as well as massive road rehabilitation.
Nowadays Fashola’s efforts have won bipartisan praise, a phenomenon rarely seen in Nigeria. Nobel laureate and social critic Wole Soyinka says: “Fashola diagnoses the problems and goes at it like a skilled mechanic.”
“There is no finish line in this journey,” says Fashola, whose term expired last year and who now oversees Nigeria’s federal Ministries of Energy, Works and Housing.
Both he and his predecessor Tinubu set a high bar.
The jury is still out on the current governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, who took the reins in May last year. But for Lagos, the mantra continues to be Eko o ni baje indeed.