A leading journalist and economist, Howard French, has said that the economy of Lagos State will surpass that of Nigeria if current trends continue. The associate professor at Columbia University made the disclosure yesterday in an in-depth article published in the Atlantic and entitled, ‘How Africa’s New Urban Centers Are Shifting Its Old Colonial Boundaries’.
Here is an excerpt from the publication:
Lagos, which sits in the southwestern corner of Nigeria, sprawled over a collection of islands and swampy coastlands, occupies the leading edge of this phenomenon. Today, its extraordinary growth is driving sweeping changes in a five-country region that stretches 500 miles westward along a band of palm-shaded seaboard all the way to Abidjan, Ivory Coast, a mushrooming city of perhaps six million people that has long been this region’s other major economic and cultural pole.
In between them, in one of the busiest staging areas of the historic Atlantic slave trade, West Africa is laying the foundations of one of the world’s biggest megalopolises, and in Lagos itself, the start of a potentially powerful new city-state.
With an estimated 18 million people (no one knows for sure) Lagos has grown in size nearly 40-fold since independence, and its expansion is still accelerating. Nigerian demographers estimate that as many as 5,000 newcomers migrate here every day, putting Lagos on track to easily double in size again before mid-century, when it will be a top contender for the title of the world’s largest city.
For decades, Lagos suffered one of the worst images of any city in the world, known widely as a place of thieving politicians, streets that crackled with danger, rotting infrastructure and “go-slows,” the monstrous, daily traffic jams in which people melt in their seats in the stifling, humid heat while praying they won’t be held up at gunpoint by robbers. The city’s most famous native son, the late musician, Fela, even coined a shorthand term for the Lagos’s litany of hardships: “impossibility-ism.”
But with the outside world having almost written it off, Lagos has recently enjoyed a prolonged run of strong economic growth, swelling its GDP to twice the size of Kenya’s, the richest and most important nation in East Africa. And while booming like this, Lagos has also begun to quietly develop a reputation for some of the most effective local governments in all of West Africa.
Under the leadership of a succession of ambitious, modernizing governors from the opposition Action Party, Lagos has embarked on an unprecedented construction spree, building freeways, sub-Saharan Africa’s first metro system outside of South Africa, and public housing units on a large scale. At the same time, this famously rough place has even added subtler quality of life improvements like the proliferation of public green spaces.
In a torrential afternoon rain one day, I drove to the seafront of Victoria Island, Lagos’s main business and financial quarter, to visit one of the city’s most ambitious new developments, a vast real estate project known as Eko Atlantic City. It is an entirely new district will house 250,000 people in high-rise apartment buildings, banks in corporate office towers, other businesses and hotels, and an 18-mile tramway.
With physical space for expansion fast running out, to build it, the city is filling in with rocks and sand 9 million square meters of ocean, an area one and a half times larger than Victoria Island itself.
For now, all that one can see is a vast, flat expanse of sand that stretches to the horizon, its southern border defined by a nearly 4.5-mile long seawall of boulders and concrete tetrapods piled high to hold back the ocean.
Ten enormous dump trucks filled with large rocks rumbled by while I climbed atop the seawall. On average, I was told, 300 of them unburden themselves of their 25-30 ton loads every day.
“Land used to exist here,” a guide in hardhat told me, as we stood on the newly packed sand. “It took about 100 years for the ocean to reach that point,” she said, gesturing toward Victoria Island’s Bar Beach in the distance.
If Lagos alone were growing like this, the disruption it would pose to the region’s staid political order would be marginal. But along with the world’s fastest population growth, over the next several decades Africa will also experience the highest urbanization rates anywhere on the planet. In this decade alone, cities in West Africa will swell by an additional 58 million people, according to the United Nations.
Between 2020 to 2030, an additional 69 million people will fill out the region’s bulging cities, and urbanization rates will continue accelerating like this at least until mid-century.
As a result, demographers foresee the emergence of hundreds of new, full-fledged cities born from what are now modest, faceless towns, as well as many others simply created from scratch that will begin popping to life like stars born from gathering dust in the cosmos.
Most existing cities, meanwhile, will undergo enormous expansion, swelling beyond recognition from what they have looked like only recently. Here and there, new urban corridors will spring up, along the lines of the 50-million strong 400-mile stretch of eastern seaboard between Boston and Washington, D.C., only far more populous.
And this is where Africa’s new political geography comes in. A simple tally of the projections for the three principal cities in this corridor, Lagos, Abidjan, and Accra, adds up to a mid-century population of 54 million.
To this, however, one must add places like Ibadan, Nigeria (presently 2 million people), only 80 miles from Lagos, Takoradi, Ghana (500,000 people), and the capitals of what are today sovereign countries, Lomé, Togo (1.5 million) and Cotonou, Benin (1.2 million). Throw in the countless other towns and cities along the way that will be swelling or springing to life, and the foreseeable result is a dense and nearly unbroken urban zone from end to end.
While I was in Abidjan on a recent visit, ground was broken on a multilane highway project that will run eastward along the coast, to Ghana, replacing the familiar old, potholed carriage road that for decades has rambled through brine-swept palm oil plantations.
A few weeks later in Nigeria, I visited an immense new Chinese industrial zone being built on the far western outskirts of Lagos, the Lekki Free Zone, a 60-40 joint venture between a Chinese consortium and the Lagos State government that is being promoted as West Africa’s answer to Dubai.
Even if that seems like a stretch, global energy firms and Chinese manufacturers of everything from furniture and palm oil products, to solar panels and automobiles, have already become early, enthusiastic investors. A Singaporean company, meanwhile, is at work building a deep-water port, which is due to begin operations in 2015, and to the immediate northwest of the zone, a new international airport is also under construction.
Investment in the zone represents a bet that if the government can provide land and labor at internationally competitive rates, along with reliable power supply and streamlined immigration and customs formalities, foreign investors will flock to the area. Their aim would not only be to manufacture things for export to faraway markets, but to take advantage of the emerging West African megalopolis’s attractive demographics, including high population density and a fast-rising middle class.
To reach Lekki, one zips along on what is arguably the most important of that city’s recent mega-projects: the Badagary Expressway, a newly opened, ten-lane road and rail corridor that will soon push onward to the nearby border with Benin.
Far more than a simple road, the highway is the physical embodiment of the politically transformative integration to come — think the I-95 of West Africa. At some point before long, it will merge with the highway being built eastward from Ivory Coast, perhaps somewhere in Ghana. But even before that can happen, tiny Benin and Togo, countries whose sliver-thin shapes mark them as conspicuous examples of fanciful European mapmaking, will face a powerful new existential challenge.
The most sacrosanct rule of continental politics in the post-independence era has always been the taboo on tampering with Africa’s borders, which almost every state has recognized as arbitrary and irrational, and yet equally essential. The Europeans may have consulted no Africans in drawing them up, but to renounce them now would be to open a gigantic Pandora’s box, and a recipe for endless, costly conflict.
But now the massive growth of cities in the region points to ways that borders and the nation states they contain can be overtaken or even rendered irrelevant without war or confrontation.
Like that of Lagos, well-managed, democratic Ghana’s resource-driven economy is booming, meaning that for Togo and Benin, the two little backwaters sandwiched in between them, hopes of prosperity will increasingly mean hitching their fortunes to those of their far larger neighbors. This will steadily force French speakers in these countries to opt for English, at a minimum, as the language of business and opportunity. And the switch of colonial languages is likely to be merely the first step toward unprecedented integration.
In fact, many see Lagos’s creeping interpenetration of Benin as being already well under way, pointing to a 2003 incident as an important milestone. It involved an armed robber from neighboring Benin who attacked a car owned by a close friend of the sitting Nigerian president’s daughter. The bandit fled back to Benin to escape arrest, but Nigeria punitively closed its border, which essentially meant cutting off trade with Lagos, Benin’s lifeline. Within 72 hours the suspect was arrested and delivered to Nigerian authorities.
“We already have houses on the border where the sitting room is in Nigeria and the bedroom is in Benin,” said F.A.D. Oyekunmi, a demographer at University of Lagos. “I think Benin will remain the Benin Republic, but the string of communities that will spring up along the Badagary Expressway, all the way to the border and beyond, will become the nucleus of one new, giant and integrated urban area — one economy.”
The biggest challenge posed by the growth of Lagos and the consolidation of an enormous, sub-regional economic zone around it, however, is not to the city’s minuscule neighbors. Rather, it is to Nigeria’s continued existence as a unitary nation.
If present trends continue, in another decade or two, Lagos’s economy will surpass the size of the rest of Nigeria.
What has held the country together in the past, however tenuously, is the redistribution of money earned from the country’s oil exports. But this is changing fast, as Lagos booms and its dependence on this ever more thinly sliced revenue — what Nigerian politicians call the “national cake” — dwindles.
“If [Lagos’s] GDP continues to rise the way it is, the federal contribution to [the city] could shrink to 5 percent,” Folarin Gbadebo-Smith, the director of a leading independent Nigerian think tank, the Center for Policy Alternatives told me in an interview in his stylish offices. “What you would end up with is a virtual country. All of the parameters, absent an army, police and currency of your own, are there. We are good to go.”
Not everyone agrees that Lagos can achieve this kind of autonomy through economic change alone. But as strong as it is, growth may only be the second most important challenge the city poses to the nation.
Read the full story at the Atlantic.
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