INSIDE LAGOS:The struggle to tame Africa's beast of a megacity

LAGOS (Reuters) - A walk along the two
kilometers of light rail that Lagos
authorities have managed to build in three
years gives a sense of how hard it is to
impose order on one of Africa's most
chaotic cities.
From either side of the concrete structure -
no track has yet been laid - the crowded
slums and highways of Nigeria's lagoon-
side commercial hub teem with activity.
Its trademark yellow buses overtake,
undertake and force their way down
impossibly narrow side streets, where
women stir pots next to canals clogged with
rubbish.
With between 15 million and 21 million
people - the upper estimate is the official
one, though no one really knows - and
generating a third of GDP for Africa's
second biggest economy, Lagos has
become almost as alluring to yield-hungry
investors as it is to the 4,000 or so
economic migrants who turn up each day.
Violent crime, mushrooming slums, police
extortion and widespread fraud have often
held investment back, but in the past
decade, authorities have started trying to
tackle some of the obstacles, especially
maddening traffic bottlenecks.
"Just keeping Lagos roads moving without
rail, pushing that kind of tonnage just
through our road network, now that's the
eighth wonder of the world," says Governor
Babtunde Fashola.
Fashola and his predecessor, Bola Tinubu,
have tried to turn the city from a byword
for squalor into a glitzy business hub. Their
success will rest on projects like the light
rail, which has involved massive and
controversial slum clearance.
If they manage, it could become an
investment hub in Africa and a model for
fast-urbanizing African nations. If not, it
might face a dystopian crime-ridden future
not unlike its past.
"WE CAN'T STOP THEM COMING"
If Lagos were a country its GDP would make
it Africa's seventh biggest economy - more
than twice the size of Kenya's. Its large
consumer market is already well
established for firms like Unilever, Heineken
and Nestle.
One of Africa's biggest stock markets sits
here, as does its second biggest market in
government bonds. Industry is hampered
by poor power generation, but the service
sector is booming.
Lagos accounts for more than half the non-
oil economy of Africa's leading energy
producer, says economist Paul Collier, who
sees it as key to breaking the country's
dependence on oil.
"Lagos is Africa's best chance of a
productive megacity," he wrote in The
Plundered Planet. "As oil runs down and is
replaced by a new economy ... Nigeria's
economic future lies in Lagos."
But it faces a daily challenge just trying to
keep up with the pace of population
growth, much of it on the edge of water.
Nigeria, already pushing 170 million
people, will be home to 400 million by
2050, making it the world's fourth most
populous country, according to the global
Population Reference Bureau (PRB). Lagos
will have roughly doubled in size by then,
Fashola and demographers agree.
On top of Nigeria's high birth rate, there is
migration.
"The more successful Lagos is, the more
people it attracts. That's the Catch-22," said
Kayode Akindele, partner in a Lagos-based
consultancy. "Social services can't keep
up."
Fashola's planning commissioner Ben
Akabueze thinks Lagos could have 35
million people by 2025 on current growth
rates. In 1970, authorities say, there were
just 1.4 million Lagosians.
"We can't stop them from coming,"
Akabueze told Reuters from his office in
mainland Lagos's noisy, heaving Ikeja
district. "There's been a net positive
migration almost on a daily basis."
To try to cope better, the government is
rolling out a compulsory residents'
registration. "Everybody is welcome,"
Akabueze says. "But we want to document
the people who stay."
VEHICLES FOR CHANGE
The influx puts pressure on inadequate
housing, and spawns unemployed youths
with few options for making a living outside
the street gangs - the infamous 'area boys'
who informally control territory and extort
money from passers by.
But the biggest headache is travel. The
transport authority says there are 9 million
road trips a day in the city. Some Lagosians
get up at 4.30 a.m. to make the office by
nine.
Things are improving; highways were
widened and police stationed at
bottlenecks. New ferry services now beat
traffic by crossing the lagoon in a state one
fifth of which is water.
Tutu Adewale, an assistant to a financial
professional, used to spend three or four
hours each way commuting by bus along a
tangle of bridges. Now it takes her 45
minutes by boat.
"I made do with it, but it's such a relief
now," she said.
The $2.5 billion light rail project will take
more time. China's state-owned China Civil
Engineering Construction Corporation
(CCECC) began work in 2010, but there are
still 25 km left to build on the $1.3 billion
east-west line, and no work has started on
the 35 km north-south one.
The project is behind schedule because
there is barely a stretch of land on which
someone isn't living or trading.
Thousands of illegal settlements erected by
slum dwellers have been destroyed this
year. No one has been compensated,
because they were never supposed to be
there to begin with.
Amnesty International in August
condemned the eviction of 9,000 residents
of Badia East and the razing of their homes
in February, leaving many to sleep in
mosquito-infested streets.
In one incident, 72 traders from the Igbo
ethnic group were deported to their
ancestral lands after their houses were
bulldozed. That appeared to give slum
clearance an ugly ethnic dimension, and
Fashola made a reluctant public apology.
"My shop was just right in front of that
bridge," said Igbo trader Uche Okonkwo,
43, surveying the wreckage of a market
trashed to make way for the rail. "They
demolished the warehouse, the shops, the
offices, the showroom, everything."
FUTURE FOR THE POOR?
Fashola's defenders say slums have to be
removed if projects like the light rail are to
happen, but critics say the heavy-handed
approach shows a lack of sensitivity to the
poor.
The governor is fixing the city for the
besuited business types, they say, but has
been slow on things like low-cost housing
to help those sleeping under bridges or on
rubbish tips.
"Much as I admire Fashola, I don't see
enough being done to help those at the
bottom," blogger Tolu Ogunlesi told
Reuters in a chic art cafe in the prestigious
Victoria Island, an area housing one the
world's highest concentrations of
millionaires.
"They're talking about building 1,000 low-
cost housing units a year, but we need
hundreds of thousands a year," he said.
There's no shortage of housing projects for
the rich. Moss-dusted colonial-era houses
in leafy Ikoyi district are becoming rare as
they get torn down and swapped for luxury
flats.
At Bar Beach on the Atlantic Coast, tonnes
of sand is being poured into the ocean to
reclaim it for the proposed Eko Atlantic
city, a Dubai-style gated community that
will have chrome skyscrapers, business
parks, palm trees and a marina.
Being on water is the only thing it will have
in common with the Makoko slum a few
miles away, where 100,000 fishing people
live in houses on stilts with no sanitation.
"MORE ACCOUNTABLE"
At his desk piled high with papers, Fashola
resents the notion he has neglected the
poor. He points to projects like massive
mains water provision, which will when
finished provide 10-20 liters a day to
Lagosians, even if the city swells to 35
million, he says.
But the state's message is: if you leave the
poverty of your village to live on the streets
in Lagos, that's your lookout.
"If you have nowhere to stay, then stay in
your village. You can't simply jump on a
bus and come live under a bridge,"
Akabueze says.
The governor has won praise for dealing
with crime. Many area boys have been co-
opted - some as yellow-shirted traffic cops,
while others keep order in bus terminals.
Violent crime has steadily fallen since he
took office in 2007, though there was been
a spike in kidnapping this year.
"There was a time security was a big
problem, especially robbery, but you have
to hand it to them, things got a lot better,"
said Lagos tycoon Tony Elumelu.
Many fret about what will happen when the
governor steps down in 2015.
"Everything Fashola's done can easily be
reversed. You'd just have to do nothing, it
would be reversed," said Akindele.
Yet a growing number of business people
feel the state's efforts to bring some kind of
order to Lagos may be becoming
irreversible. Corruption is rife, but
institutions function; rubbish is collected,
streets are swept, hedges trimmed.
"Lagos is depersonalizing politics," United
Bank for Africa CEO Philips Oduoza said.
"Institutions are becoming more important
than people, and that could outlast the
governor."
Reinforcing this are rocketing tax receipts;
65 percent of state revenues are now non-
oil.
The governor, who gets up at 7 a.m. and
works until 3 a.m., says his to-do list isn't
getting any shorter.
"In a football match, the last 15 minutes
can be the most decisive," he says,
creaking back in his leather chair. "So I
intend to finish with as much pace as we
started."
($1 = 159.8500 naira)