Megacity Lagos Nigeria

George Packer has written an insightful article on The Mega City decoding the chaos of Lagos, in the current issue of the New Yorker.

Lagos is the sixth largest city in the world, with the fastest growing population.

Lagos airport has a fearsome reputation, with its official shakedowns and swarming touts. Once you make it to the city you are surrounded by armed robbers, con men, corrupt policeman and homicidal bus drivers.

In this city only .4% of the inhabitants have a toilet connected to a sewer system.
Muslim Hausas from the North coexist in the slums with Christian Yorubas from the South. Armed gangs represent the interests of both groups.

Informal transactions make up at least 60% of economic activity, crowds of boys as young as eight hawk everything from cell phones to fire extinguishers.

Writers like Robert Neuwirth have popularized the idea of an urban slum dwellers as heroic builders of the cities of tomorrow and Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth catalog, refers to slums as a global city of interconnected entrepreneurs. The author, George Packer argues that the vibrancy of the squatters of Lagos is the furious activity of people who live in a globalized economy and have no safety net and virtually no hope of moving upward.

Around a billion people- almost half of the developing worlds urban population live in slums. The United Nations human settlements program, in a 2003 report titled the challenge of the slums declared, "the urban poor are trapped in an informal and illegal world- in slums that are not reflected on maps, where waste is not collected, where taxes are not paid, and where public services are not provided. Officially they do not "exist".

Rem Koolhaas, a Dutch architect and urban theorist, who has traveled to Lagos, has described it as "protean organism that creatively defies constrictive Western ideas of urban order. What is now fascinating is how with some level of self-organization, there is a strange combination of extreme underdevelopment and development".

The author realistically finds Lagos fascinating only if one is able to leave it. Self organization is collective adaptation to extreme hardship.

There is no capital to start business in Lagos, the people blame the corrupt government. Oil-export revenue exceeded fifty billion dollars in 2005. In 1993 a bloodless coup overthrew civilian rule in Nigeria, and for the next sixteen years a series of miliary dictators from Northern Nigeria treated Lagos, the country’s center of democratic activism, as a source of personal enrichment.

Unlike other cites like Bombay, most of Lagos is a slum, which suffer from misuse.

In the mid-eighties the dictatorship of General Ibrahim Babangida, Nigeria had to submit to austerity measures prescribed by the world bank and IMF, in order to reduce the thirty million dollar debt. The structural adjustments lead to closing of inefficient state run enterprises, and selling them to private enterprises. The effect of these polices lead to concentration of wealth in a few hands, leaving the majority of people very poor.

Nigeria has a massive growth in population with a stagnant or shrinking economy. Theorists like Koolhaas can look at a burning garbage heap and describe it as an urban phenomenon, but that will not help improve the lives of Lagos’s garbage pickers and street vendors. They will either revolt against their conditions, or the military will be able to silence their voices and we will not even know that they existed in the first place.